Evercoast Powers Sebastian Yatra's Groundbreaking Holographic Performance

In an immersive environment, thanks to volumetric capture technology Evercoast, the 5G Ultra Wideband of Verizon and mobile edge computing, the colombian artist Sebastian Yatra has offered a virtual concert with a hologram of himself.

The virtual concert, in which the Colombian artist Sebastian Yatra has performed a version in English and Spanish of his hit song red heels, forming a 'duo' with a AR hologram of himself, has been produced by Verizon, the platform Pandora and virtual production technologies Magnopus and volumetric capture Evercoast.

Sebastian Marino, Evercoast CTO, explains that “our volumetric capture technology reduces production cost and simplifies the creation of high-end digital humans, allowing teams to integrate AR holograms into virtual production workflows”.

This immersive Yatra performance, in partnership with Magnopus, Verizon y Pandora, “It is just one of many examples of how volumetric capture is poised to improve the future of virtual production technology,” says Marino.. Allows creators to capture photorealistic 3D performances directly in-camera, without the need to create complex assets or clean up the motion capture”.

To create the augmented reality hologram of the Colombian artist, Magnopus collaborated with Evercoast, during a day of filming in the Verizon 5G Lab, this provider's volumetric capture facility in Playa Vista (California).

Previously, before filming, Yatra performance was methodically planned, song choice, choreographed movements, wardrobe and hairstyle, during months of pre-production, to ensure all elements were optimized for volumetric capture.

The day of filming, Yatra performed the English part of his iconic duet against a green screen while surrounded by 360º cameras. This performance was captured volumetrically as an augmented reality hologram using Evercoast technology and transmitted to the facility's monitors., which allowed the artist to see himself singing in real time, like a 3D avatar.

The complete song, his well-known success red heels, was recorded in one continuous take, although the team filmed several takes with different variations of the artist's performance.

AJ Sciutto, Magnopus virtual production manager, He remembers that “it was the first time he worked with Evercoast technology, and volumetric video processing time and cost per minute were significantly lower than the competition. “It has been a pleasure to work with a creative partner who understood the technical requirements of making this concert.”.

Operated live and captured on a virtual production shoot on a Led volume, where Yatra performed the Spanish part of his duet, Magnopus developed a real-time workflow that allowed the team to see the AR hologram meshed with the artist's live performance..

Via Verizon's 5G network, Magnopus sent the Led volume camera tracking data to a Unreal Engine which was running on 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength.

Thanks to it, the team was able to render the Yatra hologram with the virtual camera data applied, and then transmit the video to the monitors on the set, where camera operators could see all live and virtual elements combined.

“This all happened in real time.”, with a latency of milliseconds - Sciutto emphasizes -, which allowed the team to frame the shots in the final composition, with the real Sebastián Yatra, the hologram and the virtual background, everything on your monitors”.

In addition to red heels, Magnopus filmed four additional songs and a Q&A session with Yatra, which were edited in the final virtual concert and broadcast to the public last June.

“Streaming high-fidelity 3D objects into game engines is part of our distributed rendering work.”, using Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength -adds Andrew Zarick, head of game engine technology incubation at Metaverse & Web 3.0 from Verizon-.Work with Evercoast, Magnopus and Sebastian Yatra was a fantastic way to make this exploration visible to an engaged audience, through an opportune musical moment2.

Para Sciutto, “the visual effects were amazing; Working with such a talented artist was incredible., and my favorite part is knowing that this is the first step towards a revolution in filmmaking. By offloading part of the rendering process to the cloud via edge computing, “We took the first steps to demonstrate that you don't need multi-million dollar machine rooms to run an LED wall stage.”.