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Unit1 Books “Hyper-Realistic” Avatars
The Fake Fab Four // Illustration by Kate Walker
Music-tech startup Unit1 has raised $20 million to recreate iconic concerts using hologram avatars.
The Holographic Picture: Hologram concerts really kicked off a little over a decade ago when Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and Tupac took the main stage at Coachella. More recently, the ABBA Voyage concert series has become a surprise breakout hit. Those projects are expensive to put on, but Unit1 has allegedly found a way to lower the cost, which could help scale the tech’s use.
Behind The Avatars: Founded by Barney Wragg, the former CEO of musical-theater legend Andrew Lloyd Webber’s entertainment group, Unit1 hopes to pack venues with fans of artists who aren’t really there.
Unit1 plans to stage classic concerts from living artists who have retired from touring or deceased musicians whose estates want to revitalize their catalogs.
The company crafts these concerts through a mix of performance capture, archival footage, and even hiring lookalike actors to play musicians who are no longer with us.
Unit1 combines those assets with real musicians and clever IRL atmospheric enhancements to make it seem like the avatars are actually there.
The $20 million in funding is being earmarked for R&D and striking licensing deals with artists and their estates.
Encore: The Guardian reports that Unit1 is already experimenting with its tech with Scottish artist KT Tunstall, recreating a performance she did 20 years ago on the show Later… with Jools Holland. The key to Unit1’s potential success is that it can be done a lot cheaper than the ABBA Voyage show because its avatar concerts can essentially be retrofitted to any stage.
Coming Soon: It’s only a matter of time before real artists are regularly collaborating with avatars on stage. Wild.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.