Welcome to The Other Side

What are the differences between his first avatar and his New Year’s Day concert virtual avatar? Well this time we were able to add detail to his avatar bringing its likeness closer to Jean-Michel Jarre himself (features, body shape…) all while respecting his wishes to have a stylized artistic holographic avatar.

Why a stylized holographic avatar? 

We respected JMJ’s wish to have an avatar that didn’t resemble something from a video game, but rather something closer but not entirely true to reality. On the contrary, he asked us to work around the existing limitations and to design an artistic avatar.

The big difference with the first Alone Together concert was the major challenge of transcribing JMJ’s movement and gestures into the virtual world in real time without him having to wear a virtual headset.

So for this concert, the technology had to be as discreet as possible so that JMJ could be filmed by real (physical) cameras without having to wear cumbersome equipment (sensors, helmets etc…).

To achieve this, we used a mix of technologies: a combination of motion capture with accelerometers placed all over JMJ’s body, gloves equipped with sensors to retrieve information from the fingers, an infrared tracking device with a Kinect infrared camera and a live one to / and a VIVE to give JMJ the “freedom” to move around.

As the concert was broadcast on different types of media (radio, TV, VR, web…) we had to make sure we kept quality to a maximum despite the constraints of each media platform. We had to find solutions to minimize the loss of the high definition quality we were able to achieve for Jean-Michel Jarre’s avatar.