With Wired Sussex I embarked on an extraordinary venture to redefine digital music experiences. Merging innovative technology and the art of music, we developed Alternative Stages — a multi-user WebVR gig platform for the modern era. This trailblazing project, revealed at the Brighton 5G Music Festival, manifested the strength of 5G technology in delivering captivating immersive arts experiences.
The Problem
Although the digital music industry had been burgeoning, there was a palpable absence of truly immersive virtual gigs. Most platforms merely offered a 360-degree video experience that left the viewer isolated, cutting off the sense of community that underlies the charm of live gigs. My vision was to design a solution capable of offering an interactive, immersive, and social VR experience.
How We Built It
Alternative Stages is a WebVR platform designed to bring Brighton’s grassroots music venues to life in the digital realm. It facilitates the enjoyment of live or pre-recorded gigs from home while still maintaining the spirit of live concerts, providing genuine 6 degrees of freedom — enabling users to explore venues, socialise with other attendees, and enjoy immersive performances.
The journey started with venue selection, guided by our partner PlatformB. We opted for venues iconic to Brighton’s music scene: The Green Door Store, The Hope and Ruin, St Georges Church, and the Brighton Dome Auditorium. Each venue was digitally recreated using a combination of Polycam’s LIDAR scanning and Matterport Pro 2 3D scanning.
For performances, we strategically planned artist recordings to integrate with the 3D environments, maintaining static lighting to match the scanned venues and employing 4k video to capture performances. We used AWS S3 for hosting and Mozilla Hubs as our open-source multiuser WebVR platform.
What We Learned
The most interesting insight came from our internal testing. The public gigs were controlled — no user-spawned objects, structured experiences. But when my gaming guild got access to a private unrestricted room, they created absolute chaos: anime characters, GIFs everywhere, virtual graffiti. And it was brilliant. It was alive in a way the polished version wasn’t.
It taught me something important about virtual spaces: people want creative freedom and the ability to make a mess. That’s what makes spaces feel real. The metaverse won’t look like Meta’s sterile vision. It’ll look more like someone’s bedroom wall — chaotic, personal, and full of in-jokes. I wrote more about this in VR, Music, and the Joy of A Little Chaos.