‘Fiction Festival’ will bring the music festival experience into the home, allowing users to watch their favourite acts and meet like-minded people, all while in a customisable environment.
Though music festivals draw hundreds of thousands of attendees, the collective experience of live music and meeting new people is not accessible to everyone. Physical festivals are often not user-friendly for those living with disabilities or mental illness, but Fiction Festival is designed to be inclusive for all. Available through both a VR headset and a PC, the event can be experienced at home or in a safe environment.
Fiction Festival is an immersive experience in which users will have the option to select which area of the festival they wish to visit: the ‘Rock Stage’, the ‘Indie Stage’, the ‘Pop Stage’, or the ‘Social Space’. At each stage, the user will be able to select from several artists to stream a pre-recorded set. No longer is there cause for worry about the best artists clashing – Fiction Festival performances can be enjoyed at the user’s convenience.
The user will also have the opportunity to personalise how they experience the music performances, choosing from three environments: a beach, outer space, and a mountain peak, and will also be able to adjust the audio to their preferences, by enhancing the singer/bass/drums etc. This creates a unique experience that could only be experienced through immersive media.
The social space differs from the stages, and is an area where users can interact with each other through a live messaging service. This area will also be customisable, so that the user can once again choose an environment and opt to have background music of their choice, or to have no music at all and ambient audio instead.
Fiction Festival will bring the experience of being at a real-life festival into the home, providing an experience for those who feel the festival scene is inaccessible, or those who are missing the feeling of being at a real festival owing to the ongoing pandemic. Ordinarily, visitors to music festivals would be able to choose from a line-up of performances, experience sets as part of a large crowd and engage with like-minded people. This experience will replicate these elements and build on them, to create a unique and stimulating environment in which users can tailor their own experience.