The WebXR Awards

In the beginning of 2022, The 2nd Annual WebXR Awards known as “The Polys” approached OnBoardXR about the potential to devise and perform “the first live halftime show in the metaverse.” Ben Erwin, Karen Alexander and Steve Lewis stressed the importance of being able to perform several short, concurrent acts within a five-minute, live, uninterrupted stream as part of a mixture of live and pre-recorded assets from Sophia Moshasha and Julie Smithson that were being simultaneously streamed to several “watch parties” on different platforms, including Altspace, Mozilla Hubs, ENGAGE, VR Chat, YouTube and their own website.

OnBoardXR presents…The Poly’s Live Halftime Show

Our intention was the showcase the most ecclectic and stable of OnBoardXR’s features and content, embracing the trend of halftime performances to provide a “medley” of various artist highlights presented in concert together.

Custom World Building

One of the watch parties for The 2nd Annual Polys was a custom Mozilla Spoke scene created by MattBCool. We requested a copy of this asset to spin up on the OnBoardXR client to start the halftime show “in” the same world where the audience would be watching (just like starting a real-world halftime show with a performer seated in the stands with fans).

Cinema Mode

One of the cue-system customizations created by Michael Morran for Non-Player Character’s hybrid performance on an IMAX screen allows a dedicated Role for a "cinema track.". If a user logs into the virtual experience using this custom url, their POV will be animated automatically through the world based on pre-determined timing and events triggered by our stage manager, much like an amusement park ride or drone cinematography in a film. By providing this url to the livestream team at The Poly’s they could seamlessly access and broacast a cinematic, third-person view of the entire live show without the need to operate the controls or attend rehearsals.

Live Musical Theater

Brendan Bradley greeted the viewers as the protagonist avatar from the musical Non-Player Character complaining in-character that NPC’s never received any awards and inviting the audience “inside my heart to see how it feels to be snubbed.” Bradley adapted a version of one of Non-Player Character’s songs (‘Break’) with lyrics to highlight the event and sang live with a backing track, using a virtual cable.

MY HEART BEAT’S RACING, MY SYSTEM’S SHAKING

THE POLY’S HALFTIME SHOW

YOU’RE STARING AT THE FUTURE OF THE WEB

SO STRAP IN WE GOT A LONG, LONG WAY TO GO

Avatar Manipulation

Several other cue-system customizations created by Michael Morran were showcased in The Poly's Live Halftime Show, including avatar and object manipulation, animation tables, and god mic capabilities. While Bradley performed a snippet of Non-Player Character, Michael Morran animated his avatar and the audience’s POV throughout the environment, ultimately “slingshotting” the audience into the chest of Bradley’s avatar, through a winding ventrical to a heart environment.

Full Body Motion Capture

Inside the heart environment, Unwired Dance Theatre’s Clemence Debaig performed an abridged version of Unwanted Waters using a Perception Neuron motion capture suit to puppet a full body threejs avatar in the scene. The cinema track was pre-emptively mapped out based on the timing of her choreography so the audience felt as if they were following the dancer through the experience. At the beginning and end of the choreography, Clemence programmed a portal to appear showing her real-world self via web cam and stepping “into” and “out” of the virtual world by cleverly allowing the portal to obscure her avatar. This allowed the audience to see that she was dancing live in her living room to puppet the avatar in real time.

Conclusion

At the conclusion on Unwanted Waters, Michael Morran animated the audience perspective into the bright portal, filling their screen with white light, creating a natural transition for The Poly’s livestream team to cut to a white screen with text and return to their show.

Ironically, the only techincal error during the live performance was the livestream’s team Open Broadcaster Software needing to be re-started before they cued the halftime show, causing a roughly 90 second blackout before the halftime show went live.