Can a VR concert in cinemas offer a unique live music experience? We went to find out!

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many artists, unable to hold in-person concerts, used virtual concerts as a way to engage with fans during lockdowns. It was a fascinating experiment: they’re not the same as the real thing, but the best ones never attempted to be, either. Those took advantage of the format, freed from the constraints of a fixed stage to embody their musical identity within a multimedia performance. A particularly memorable one for me was when a Japanese idol group I like turned an entire holiday resort into a live stage, allowing for music, chaos, and even a boat ride to frame their performance in place of their typical annual stadium summer concert.

Now, live concerts are back. Despite the occasional merits of the formula, the virtual concert has mostly disappeared, with limited exceptions such as from VTubers. Still, this doesn’t mean the format's potential to bring a new dimension to a performance has been entirely discarded. Teaming up with AmazeVR, numerous K-pop groups are using VR and turning the online concert into a communal experience even for those without a headset via cinemas worldwide. ENHYPEN are the latest to join the trend, with their first VR concert recently premiering in South Korea and Japan ahead of traveling to the US and other countries in the coming months.

But is this actually worth your time, and what is it like to attend a VR concert in a cinema?

On a humid evening in Tokyo, I made my way to the Shinjuku Wald 9 cinema to find out for myself. While I'm familiar with the group’s music, I wouldn’t call myself a diehard fan like the many who flocked to the cinema and entirely sold out each of the 7 screenings per day this cinema hosted on its opening weekend. By comparison, my Wednesday-evening event was certainly quieter, though far from empty.

Cutouts of the group’s members adorned the cinema lobby, and while walking into the screen itself, I'm handed an entry bonus of an A3 poster and photo cards. I'm also provided a sanitary face mask to wear prior to putting on the Quest 3 headset used for the experience. With music videos and their voices blaring through the cinema speakers, I took my seat.

As the event got underway, we were guided through a simple setup process to ensure even first-time users could put on the headset with ease. We were requested to sit fully back in our seats and hold our hands in front of us to enable hand tracking - this allows you to hold a virtual light stick to cheer along with the performance if you wish.

The VR performance is advertised to be ‘like watching a personal concert from the very first row,’ with the closest possible view and personal fan service impossible for a typical stadium concert. This is emphasized almost immediately, with each member appearing in front of me to stare into my soul like daggers mere inches away from my face. I can glance clearly at every wrinkle in their clothes and see the shape of their surprisingly angular Adam’s apples. Even as someone more neutral, I was flustered, while the rest of the audience were already lost in a sea of screams before they even sang a note.

You can, however, film a performer up close to project on a cinema screen or upload as a YouTube video. The more the show progressed, the more it became apparent that the show lacks the ambition to make that next step, and avoid this VR experience from feeling surprisingly flat in terms of execution. There are, of course, limitations the team had to consider even beyond a typical VR setup.

You can’t move from a cinema seat with up to 200 people sharing a screen with you, so anything involving free movement is off the table. Even hand calibration considers the width of the cinema seat by reinforcing that you can’t use your pen light beyond the narrow scope of your seat, likely a precaution to avoid you hitting the stranger sat next to you.

It becomes clear quickly that this is a show doing the bare minimum to please fans without truly taking full advantage of the fact that this concert is VR. The performances themselves are performed on a green screen with virtual dynamic backgrounds instead of building physical sets. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but with how static they mostly feel, it lacks dynamism, even as these highly choreographed dancers pirouette around these arenas in unison.

Rather than using a 360-degree camera, the concept of a ‘front-row seat’ is taken literally, the concert using a mostly static front-facing camera with only minimal movement. Occasionally the members will come up close and put their hand in front of your face or wink at you. However, it’s shot identically to a choreography or practice video the group already uploads to YouTube for free, just with a flashy screensaver.

No Doubt, one of the songs in the concert, is a perfect example of this. Sure, you’re closer to the dancers, and they’re looking directly at you. Yet aside from proximity, the performance is shot almost identically to a video the group has already uploaded to YouTube, with no attempt to adapt the performance to this live experience.

Why not adjust the choreography to take advantage of the new medium? You could have the members circle you rather than merely standing a few feet in front of you at all times. Instead, not only has no 360-degree video been captured, no effort has even been made to create 360-degree environments. VR by design immerses you in its world, so it’s rather disorienting that the moment you move your head from a directly forward-facing viewpoint, perhaps to glance at your favorite member, you notice the black void that exists directly behind your position.

Using VR in this ENHYPEN concert is more akin to early-2000s 3D movies that force action to pop out of the screen to ensure you’re aware of what you paid money for, rather than truly taking advantage of the new medium. Nowadays you can watch those movies in 2D at home without anything being lost in translation, and I can’t help but feel that nothing of value would be lost if you did that with this concert.

It can’t even take advantage of VR's interactivity. Towards the end of the concert, the only interactivity beyond waving your virtual pen light lets you vote on your favorite member. That's followed by that member silently sitting in front of you to wave and gesture at a handwritten message floating above their head for a few seconds before swiftly moving on.

If you’re allowing fans to vote on their favorite member and take advantage of the bespoke viewing perspective of each person’s headset, why not go further than 30 seconds of fanservice? You could replace the next song with a fancam-style performance centered on your chosen member, for example. Why not? Likely because this would have required more recording time, shooting that song multiple times from the perspective of each individual member. Whereas the actual concert feels like it was shot in a minimal number of takes over the course of a few hours. I even noticed one or two choreography mistakes, which in a pre-recorded performance are hard to overlook.

Does that actually matter, though? As a neutral viewer who thinks the music is decent but isn’t a major fan of the group, it’s easier for me to detach from the moment and judge the production qualities of this VR show more critically. And hey, it works! I feel flustered when Jungwon’s silver hair brushes close to my face and the music blasts from the cinema speakers, the only interruption being the disconnected screams of other audience members.

Those screams are clear signs of approval that a chance to get this close to the band members as they perform fan-favorite songs is worth the cost of entry for diehard fans, regardless of if they fully utilize the medium or not. Yet this is a 45-minute concert of just seven songs that costs 4400 yen (nearly $30) compared to the typical full-price Japanese cinema ticket at 2000 yen (roughly $14). Sure, you also get a photocard and poster as a bonus, but that’s expensive for such a short performance that could have been so much more with relatively little additional effort on the side of the production staff.

This was fine, though I can’t say I feel enthused to visit another VR concert cinema experience in the future. There’s a novelty to blending the clarity and proximity of the medium with the crisp clarity of cinema sound, especially when you can enjoy these concerts as a group compared to the typically solitary experience of putting on a VR headset. Yet this feels like the bare minimum, where fanservice is used to paper over the cracks and distract from just how much you spent to be there. It’s not bad, but it could be so much more.