Available today on Quest through App Lab, AmazeVR and Megan Thee Stallion’s VR concert ‘Enter Thee Hottieverse’ is the blueprint for a properly immersive, made-for-VR concert experience.
VR concerts come in many forms and so, for the most part, are a pretty mixed bag. The most common form is those found in Horizon Venues, which can sometimes be 2D video streams of live concerts projected onto a large screen in VR for you to watch by yourself or with others.
While there’s some value to be found in those experiences, they’re far from perfect and often closer to a livestream than something designed specifically for VR. A new VR concert experience featuring Megan Thee Stallion (most well known for ‘WAP’, her 2020 mega hit collaboration with Cardi B) trades the social benefits of places like Horizon Venues for something that is utterly more immersive, well-designed and unique to VR.
The result is the VR concert experience ‘Enter The Hottieverse’, which first launched as a location-based experience available in AMC theatres around the US, but is available more widely on Quest headsets from today via App Lab. This isn’t your regular, pre-filmed concert stream projected in VR, but instead a custom-built world you journey through, watching Megan perform a selection of hits right in front of you. The best part of Enter the Hottieverse is that Megan herself is displayed in 3D and integrated into the virtual ‘Hottieverse’ world. At first, it’s almost confronting seeing such a high resolution and realistic version of Megan dancing and rapping in front you – it’s incredibly convincing and looks fantastic.
It does have some limitations, as it’s not a true volumetric capture of Megan. This means that you’re viewing the 3D footage from the same angle as the camera at all times, so you can’t drastically move your head or walk around to get a view from a different angle. If you try, Megan’s position and the world will move with you to keep the angle consistent. It’s not a dealbreaker though, as the experience still works wonderfully while seated and the camera will pan your view around to different angles throughout the performance.
The app is free to download with an in-app purchase to access the full performance, which includes four songs – Body, Kitty Kat, Thot Shit and Savage. It is rated “Mature 17+” for “Suggestive Themes, Strong Language”.
You start your Hottieverse experience in a retrowave-inspired hub, where you can pick a cartridge for an individual song or choose to experience all four tracks together as a back-to-back performance. There’s a small amounts of interactivity available as well – as you wave your virtual Touch controller hands in front of you, they’ll emanate different effects for each song, for example. It’s ultimately nothing game-changing, but the small amount of interactivity on offer is just enough to elevate the experience above a solely spectator experience to something a tad more immersive.
The only catch with the concert is that’s it’s a solo experience, with no options to watch it alongside other people or your friends. It’s the only element of the traditional concert experience that’s missing, but it’s also mostly forgivable. The bottom line is that the production level and uniqueness available here is miles above what you get elsewhere. Coming from flat projections of 2D filmed performances, this immersive 3D world created by AmazeVR for Megan Thee Stallion is on a whole other level.
If you’re a fan of Megan Thee Stallion or you’re just interested in checking out the latest and most innovative VR concert experience, then Enter the Hottieverse is definitely worth checking out. You can find it on App Lab for Quest headsets now.
