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Soon this VR venue will let you rave from the comfort of home

(Techno)logy

Soon this VR venue will let you rave from the comfort of home

Queue up your best dance tracks because (techno)logy will soon make it easier than ever to home rave.

Music broadcasting group Boiler Room has teamed up with Inception to open the world’s first virtual reality venue. The two enterprises will produce made-for-VR events in the London space so listeners can Source Direct content or sweat Midwest fresh without leaving home.

Boiler Room is best known for its music live streams where dancers can be seen grooving in sweaty rave caves behind some of the world’s most talented DJs. Like an internet-age MTV, the company archives the sets online so dance music fans in New York can sample Japanese grime or take a quick getaway to Acid Camp in the Poconos:

In a statement on Business Wire, the broadcasters explained the significance of their new venture for far-flung fans who want to jack: “Most of Boiler Room’s audience is made up of global online users who tune in to watch music events they can’t attend in person. We’ve always been driven by using technology to showcase the music we care about in the most authentic way we can.” Shows will be accessible through Inception’s app.

Although music fans will have to wait until early next year to home rave, VR right now is merging the digital and the physical with shocking fluidity. This year, artist Tamiko Thiel unveiled a VR installation at the Seattle Art Museum that imagines life in the climate change–burdened anthropocene while The Guardian used VR to help viewers empathize with prisoners in solitary. Earlier this month, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) debuted a VR-enhanced exhibition at the Jewish Museum’s just-opened Pierre Chareau exhibition. At that show, DS+R uses archival photographs and prints to recreate Chareau’s interiors in digital space. “Virtual reality provided the perfect opportunity to re-spatialize these artifacts, these pieces of furniture,” firm principal Elizabeth Diller told The Architect’s Newspaper (AN). On the West Coast, firms like Gensler are using VR to communicate project concepts for the new Los Angeles Football Club stadium, a move that is “basically normalizing the technology as a design tool.”

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