The Astonishing Future of Immersive Live Entertainment | Willie Williams | TED

I would love to show you something brand new

that just happened in Las Vegas.

(“Even Better Than the Real Thing” by U2 plays)

(Music ends)

(Cheers and applause)

Thank you.

Thank you.

The Irish rock band U2, of course, inaugurating the Sphere in Las Vegas:

a brand new facility

which is somewhere between an IMAX theater and a planetarium,

large enough to contain the Statue of Liberty.

After decades of big rock shows being staged mostly in sports facilities

for 40 shows,

18,000 people a night were immersed in sound and vision

in a whole new way.

And did anybody go, by the way?

I know some people did.

Oh, yeah, OK.

Did anybody not go?

(Laughter)

Great, well, then you'll know what I'm talking about.

So I design and direct live shows.

The foundations of my work were in concert touring,

and I got to work with some really cool people,

including George Michael, R.E.M., David Bowie and many more.

And for 40 years I've been creative director for U2's live performances,

going from small clubs to football stadiums

and having done well over 1,000 shows with them

in 250 cities in 40 countries.

Yeah, it's been a journey.

I head up U2's long-standing creative team,

and every time we go to make a new show,

we're trying to reinvent the form in some way,

starting with a blank slate

and chucking out everything that's gone before.

Except for one thing,

which is always the goal of creating emotional connection

between the audience and the performers.

So in the very early '80s,

U2 was building on the roots of punk,

which came from this very pure and minimal place

where making any effort at all with your stage visuals

was considered extremely gauche and very uncool.

But as the scale of U2 shows increased,

we coined the phrase “maximum minimalism,”

and that got us into a place

where we could kind of hang on to some of this imagined authenticity

whilst catering to the needs of playing arenas and football stadiums.

And it really worked.

I mean, the raw energy of those shows was incredible,

but from a design point of view,

there's really only so far you can take that idea before you hit a wall.

So we were looking for new possibilities in visual storytelling

and through the '90s,

completely fell in love with all the new emerging visual technologies

and so embraced those, threw away the handbook

and decided to see what we could do with them.

And on a pair of U2 tours, "Zoo TV" and "Popmart,"

we pretty much introduced the style of multiscreen, big-video presentation

that’s still around today in concert touring.

And that included, for “Popmart,”

the building of the world's very first stadium-scale LED video screen,

which was hand-built from components for the tour.

They're not unambitious, these people.

Since then, we've made shows large and small,

some leading into audio-visual ideas,

others taking a more architectural stance

and along the way collaborating with a veritable who's who

of the contemporary art world.

But always with the goal of trying to challenge and reinvent

the notion of what a rock concert can be.

After 40 years of reinvention,

I suppose maybe there was another wall looming.

So when we heard about this new building that was going up in Las Vegas,

we went to check it out.

And the Sphere is designed essentially for showing movies

at humongous scale,

at extremely high resolution.

But I found myself looking at the space

and wondering if there was some other way

that we might be able to inhabit this wrap-around immersive space.

And the thing that occurred to me, the thing that really struck me,

was the absence of corners.

We navigate space via corners,

and you know how big the room is that you're in

because you can see the corners, and that helps you feel grounded.

Whereas at the Sphere, not only are there no corners,

but I wondered if we were to introduce virtual corners of our own,

would we be able to manipulate the audience's sense of perspective

and apparently alter the space radically?

So I made a whole load of test material

and was absolutely overjoyed at how well it worked.

The degree to which your brain wants to buy into the illusion is extraordinary.

And I found that I could take the Sphere

and turn it into an infinitely tall cylinder,

and then maybe into a cube,

and then bring the roof down on top of everybody.

And everything you're seeing,

all of this is just video on a curved surface.

But what it informed me

was that I needed to stop thinking about this as being a screen

and start thinking of it as being a place,

a three-dimensional audio-visual space,

and that the kind of environments that would work here

might be the kind of thing you'd make for VR,

rather than for cinema.

Now to make the illusion work, it’s vital never to break the spell.

So this sense of place has to be established

before the viewer even gets there.

And when the U2 audience arrived at the Sphere,

they walked into this gigantic optical illusion.

The scale of it really was shocking.

And they walked into this thing

which looked like an oversized version of the Pantheon in Rome,

but made out of giant concrete slabs and open to the night sky.

And I used to love eavesdropping on audience conversations

with people just trying to figure out what they were looking at,

you know, what was real and what wasn't.

But it had a genuine materiality that was really hard to resist.

So over time, I added some features to make it even harder to resist.

My favorite being this pigeon,

which used to live up in the roof space

and periodically fly around

before eventually escaping through the oculus.

And I put in a helium balloon, like a kid's helium balloon,

that got stuck in the roof, like it happens at a shopping mall.

And there was a work light that would come on and flicker.

And then right at show time,

we'd fly the band's helicopter over the roof

with a suitable soundtrack.

Now in a reality check, the band doesn’t actually travel by helicopter,

and none of this is real anyway.

But the point is,

you are in this environment for over an hour

and you never stop believing in it.

And that's before the show even started.

So during the show, we immerse the audience in new worlds,

overwhelm their senses, push the horizon back to infinity,

shape-shift the room,

and then eventually make the building disappear altogether

and reveal Las Vegas outside.

So this is the moment that we find ourselves in,

an entire audience's sensory perception being choreographed by the artist

on a scale that overwhelms the physical being.

And U2's music,

the emotive power of that music performed in this environment,

that was what was so new, that produced something really unprecedented.

Well to say it was well received would be something of an understatement.

The critics raved, the internet broke.

A whole new era of live entertainment was declared

to the point where the reviews themselves were being reviewed.

(Laughter)

Some irony, I think, but I'll take it.

I mean, jeez, you don't get that very often.

But what was more remarkable

was that it was just a couple of years after,

you know, we all wondered if we'd ever be able

to gather thousands of people together ever again.

And the pandemic was, it was a really bleak time

for everybody involved in live entertainment.

And I know you guys at TED had a tough time with it, too.

But the brightest minds of the industry,

by way of compensation, started to come up with alternatives.

And we saw some really interesting ideas.

We saw the construction of XR studios for live broadcast

and concerts for VR headsets

and virtual audiences like this,

participating in real-time, online.

And really interesting ideas.

They got a ton of attention, loads and loads of investment.

Until lockdown ended,

at which point nobody ever mentioned them again.

(Laughter)

So I've got to tell you, for those of us that do this for a living,

it was profoundly humbling to realize

that we can reproduce every part of the live experience

apart from the bit the audience actually wants the most.

Look it turns out, humans are drawn to proximity.

We want to come together in a specific place in real time

to share an experience,

kind of like we're doing this week.

And it's been my task to understand how audiences work.

And there's certainly something to learn from our response

as we look out at the ocean or up at the night sky,

where our minds are using a combination of vision and imagination

to create an emotional response that can inspire us

or sometimes completely overwhelm us.

But the interesting thing is,

we so need this response that it still works,

even if our rational minds know that what we're looking at isn't real.

Hence the power of great works of art.

Now the Renaissance painters hit upon the use of perspective

to create apparently three-dimensional worlds

on what the viewer knew had to be a flat plane.

And our brain insists it's real,

even though we know it's just marks on canvas.

But better yet,

the use of perspective allows the viewer

to forget the technique completely

and surrender to the content of the image

in a more profound and emotional way.

But we're still separated from the image here.

We're still outsiders looking in,

whereas at the Sphere we all together,

performers and audience, traveled through the picture frame,

through the proscenium and ended up as part of the environment.

And it really was quite something.

It was like VR without a headset.

Although with a couple of important differences.

In his novel "Rainbow's End,"

the writer Vernor Vinge envisaged a world

that doesn't seem too far away now,

where everybody, through the use of wearable AR technology,

could create their own bespoke artificial environments.

Now, with this U2 show, the environments were artificial,

but they were also shared,

all of us experiencing it together in real life.

And much as I do believe that gaming and certain other online activities

can produce a real sense of connection,

it was the physical proximity here that produced something so profound

and so affecting.

And U2's music, just the music,

the original immersive experience performed in this environment,

music can bring us together,

and it allows us to forget ourselves as we become part of something larger,

looking up at something so glorious and so magnificent.

But we've seen this before, right?

We recognize this from somewhere.

The cathedral builders,

they knew a thing or two about show business.

They were very good at it,

and they were not afraid of working at scale,

being the original practitioners of what we call in the business:

"Go big or go home."

(Laughter)

And look, the amount of time, the amount of resources

poured into the building of these places over centuries

tells us that we've been feeling for this experience

for as long as we've been human.

Awe and wonder placed under the control of the artist.

And today, we have the most powerful tools we've ever had to do this.

So what's our motivation here?

You know, what's our goal in doing this?

Well for me, in my work,

I only have one goal, which is to bring people together,

to share some joy and to share some magic

and to make genuine emotional connection

for the audience,

with the performers and with each other and with this music,

which means something unique and personal to everyone who attends.

And in that moment open up the possibility

of creating empathy between strangers

who might not agree on anything else.

It's a small thing, but it's a start.

And that's what my particular brand of magic exists for.

Well, that and giving people a really, really good time.

(Laughter)

(“Vertigo” by U2 plays)

(Music ends)

Thank you, have a great week.

(Applause and cheers)