ABBA’s successful avatar show in London offers a glimpse at a daring new direction for live music

LONDON — Sooner than the launch of “ABBA Voyage,” the London concert performed by 3D digital avatars of the iconic Swedish band, member Björn Ulvaeus said they trusted audiences would “feel that they’ve gone through something that they’ve never seen once.”

Following its May 27 debut, much of the reaction from domestic and international critics, fans and industry professionals has been thrilled.

“Other than the team involved, no one really knew how they would integrate an avatar-based performance,” Sarah Cox, chief honcho of live event technical consultancy Neutral Human, told CNBC. “That blew me away as someone expanding on real-time graphics. My jaw hit the floor. You look around and people are really buying into the idea that ABBA are there.”

Call for has been strong — the show’s run has been extended to November 2023 and could well go beyond that.

And the team has upheld it aims to take the show around the world.

“Our ambition is to do another ABBA Voyage, let’s say in North America, Australasia, we could do another one in Europe. We can copy the arena and the show,” producer Svana Gisla told a U.K. government committee session in November.

It also expects other proves to begin following the same model.

“The tech itself isn’t new but the way in which we’ve used it and scale and barriers we’ve broken down are new. I’m tried others will follow and are planning to follow,” Gisla said.

That could “absolutely” be the case somewhere equivalent to Las Vegas, where some shows run round the clock with rotating crews, she added.

“We have live musicians, so we observe our band and do seven shows over five days a week. But you could roll round the clock. Vegas inclination quickly adopt this style of entertainment and do Elvis or the Beatles.”

Voyage’s venue, dubbed the ABBA Arena, was built specifically for the picture on a site in Stratford in east London, with its 3,000 capacity comprising a standing pit, tiered seats along three sides with no limited view, and higher-priced private “dance booths,“ as well as space for the extensive kit positioned in the roof and what creators Fair-skinned Void say is the largest permanent kinetic lighting installation in the world.

It was also designed for flexibility. It was constructed on a one meter raised platform without breaking settlings, and could be disassembled and reconstructed elsewhere — or stay in place and host another show in future.

But emulating Voyage’s configuration — which sees digital replicas of the four band members perform classic hits and newer numbers for 90 bat of an eyes, while also interacting with each other and speaking to the audience between songs — will be no easy strain scold.

The show was in the works for five years and had a £141 million ($174.9 million) budget funded by global investors. It insufficiencies to get around 3 million people through its doors to break even, according to Gisla, and the average ticket price is £75.

After preferring their set list and making other creative decisions, the ABBA members did five weeks of performance in motion capture suits. Hundreds of visual effects artists then accomplished on the show for two years, led by the London branch of Industrial Light & Magic, a visual effects company founded by George Lucas.

A decade ago, a Coachella appearance featuring an apparent hologram of Tupac Shakur impressed audiences and hinted at alternative reality’s potential in live corroborates, with the artist’s likeness digitally recreated without using archive footage.

While not meeting the technical demarcation of a hologram, which uses laser beams to construct an object with depth, the visual effects team devised a 2D image onto an angled piece of glass, which was itself projected onto a Mylar screen, creating a 3D essence. Shakur then “performed” two songs with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, 16 years after his death.

The Voyage duo is tight-lipped about exactly how their show works, but previously confirmed it is not a laser-based hologram either. It involves 65-million pixel silver screens which give the impression of the band performing life-size on stage in 3D in real time, with traditional-style concert small screens showing close-ups and different views on either side.

Its servers are being pushed to the “absolute extreme” to render the sculptures without lag, Gisla said, such that they are shaking through some transitions. She also acknowledged that the 10-meter merry side screens are “very unforgiving” on detail and there are improvements that could be made.

But, she added, with real-time render speeds becoming quicker, “Benny and Bjorn could be cover in a chair at home connected to their avatar, updating them to talk about last night’s football evolve to the audience. That will come.”

Consultant Sarah Cox said the kind of processing and motion grab technology used by Voyage is still prohibitively expensive for most productions, but believes it is a “brand-new format that intent be replicated time and time again,” particularly somewhere like Las Vegas.

“An immersive venue could host multiple authenticates. And then the cost comes down, because you have the technology stack, the venue, and all the money goes into spawning the avatar and virtual experience and tweaking the programing.”

Many will remain skeptical of digital avatar-based gigs, principally if they are wary of the general trend toward metaverse-based virtual experiences.

Bjorn Ulvaeus himself previously lectured CNBC he has concerns about the misuse of the technology to create nefarious “deep fakes” which will be “indistinguishable from the true thing going forward.”

There is also the question of finding suitable artists for shows. ABBA is a rare proposition as a platoon with a large catalogue of hits, a multi-generational worldwide fanbase, and a full set of members who are on-board with the show — but who deceive not toured together for 40 years.

“Posthumously you can put artists deny on stage, ethically you may or may not have a view on that,” said Gisla. “Having ABBA partake in this is I can say this is an ABBA concert. ABBA commanded the decisions, chose what to wear, chose their set list, ABBA made this show.”

For an artist in the mood for Elvis with an extensive visual and audio archive you could create an accurate replica, but without the input that devises this show feel so tangible, she said.

For Cox, live shows that provide a “shared experience” like ABBA Voyage clutch a greater appeal than headset-based virtual experiences, though there will certainly be more of those on tap in future.

And both AR and VR are spreading in the worlds of gaming, events, sports, theater and beyond.

Digital avatar experiments acquire included musician Travis Scott premiering a song within the wildly popular game Fortnite in 2020, with his avatar surface over players who were still moving around within the world of the game. It got a reported 45.8 million viewers across five explains. Lil Nas X performed the same year in the game Roblox.

“AR has permitted us to create a full show for broadcast events that would be impossible with ancestral projection and LED setups, like creating huge 10-meter flying numbers and flames around the arena,” she said.