Joe GallopExtended reality (XR) platform Volta has received a £400,000 grant from Innovate UK, a Government-backed agency that provides money and support to companies to make new products and services.
Volta, a free-to-use self-service platform that produces mixed-reality concerts or live streams, recently worked at Glastonbury Festival with artists Bonobo, Jamie Jones, TSHA, Grove and Fumez The Engineer. The shows featured automated visual effects in real-time synched with their music.
XR encompasses immersive technologies including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR).
Volta said the grant will go towards researching and building audience interaction features that can bring global and local audiences together during live events. It said the aim is to enable online and physical audiences to have an impact on the experience of a live event in real-time, as well as creating a new revenue stream for artists.
Volta plans to incorporate gaming mechanics with in-app purchases and remote user interaction into live events. It also plans on hiring behavioural scientists to discover the motivation of concert-goers live and live-streamed and the psychological implications of making experiences interactive.
Volta CEO Alex Kane said, “This money not only gives us Government funding but the opportunity to methodically learn how to translate the best parts of live events into hybridised ones.”