Linde Schone is a singer and songwriter who has created a live album. It was her wish to create an over-the-top and engaging Christmas performance to immerse the audience in the joy and happiness of that time of year. Together we created a live show with live avatars and mobile AR Christmas scenes.
For years already, Linde has had the wish to create a Christmas live show to accompany her Christmas album. Her wish was to create a grandiose Christmas experience with flying elves, background dancers and Chistmas decor. We decided to use our avatar system to bring to life the background dancers as dancing elves, based on the movements of Linde.
To do so, we created a Christmas scene in the avatar system with Christmas trees and built an avatar dressed as a Christmas elf. For this, we used the various sliders in the system to create the right settings and we used a 3D elf-character we bought on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. At that time we were not able yet to set multiple avatars in the system so we could only display one avatar on screen. Spoiler: now you can create a whole crew of background dancers in our system. To capture Linde’s body movements, we set up a small camera at the front of the stage, angled at her.
To create an immersive Christmas experience, we carefully designed the stage setup to complement Linde’s performance. At the back of the stage, a short-throw projector was used to display festive visuals on the backdrop. A short-throw projector is designed to project a large image from a short distance, making it ideal for smaller venues. Throughout the performance, this projection showcased warm and cozy Christmas scenes, including crackling fireplaces, twinkling lights, and snowfall, enhancing the holiday atmosphere.
The aim was to integrate our avatar tool halfway through the show. Linde’s movements would be tracked in real time by our mocap camera and translated into the movements of the 3D elf, allowing them to dance synchronously. This would create a unique and dynamic interaction between the real and virtual worlds, making the performance even more magical.
Although Linde was on fire and performed a great set, we ran into troubles with the live avatars and the motion capturing. We had too little time to do a final check of the motion capturing prior to the show. The motion capture did not work well because of a bug in our system (which is now fixed) and the lighting at the stage. The lights were shining in the camera and because of that we were unable to capture Linde’s movements in a good way. Eventually Linde was luckily able to laugh it off and continue her performance in good fashion.
To make the performance more engaging for the audience, we decided to add 2 mobile AR scenes in which we created a snowy Christmas scene with Linde on top of a stack of Christmas presents. As well, we created a scene in which elves were flying through the room. To stay in the mood, we printed the QR code of the scenes on the back of a Christmas card that could be sent to loved ones.