Audience Experiences of a Volumetric Virtual Reality Music Video

Music videos are short films that integrate songs and imagery and are produced for artistic and promotional purposes. Modern music videos apply various media capture techniques and creative postproduction technologies to provide a myriad of stimulating and artistic approaches to audience entertainment and engagement for viewing across multiple devices. Within this domain, volumetric technologies are becoming a popular means of recording and reproducing musical performances for new audiences to access via traditional 2D screens and emergent virtual reality platforms. However, the precise impact of volumetric video in virtual reality music video entertainment has yet to be fully explored from a user’s perspective. Here we show how users responded to volumetric representations of music performance in virtual reality. Our results preliminarily demonstrate how audiences are likely to respond to music videos and offer insight into how future music videos may be developed for different user types. We anticipate our essay as a formative starting point for more sophisticated, interactive music videos that can be accessed and presented via extended-reality technologies.