In 1985 Marty McFly flew Doc Brown’s Flux Capacitor-enabled DeLorean to the future. There he donned a pair of Nike high-top trainers in order to fit in with the kids of 2015.
On Monday night, I put on a pair of knee-high gold boots and travelled back to 1979 to watch ABBA in their heyday. There, I watched a 30-something year old Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid perform their greatest hits alongside thousands of other fans - many of whom will have last attended an Abba concert 40 years ago.
The technology which has enabled the ABBA Voyage concert in London’s Olympic Park is incredibly impressive - beyond the realms of science fiction. The tech envisaged by the creative directors on Back to the Future included a holographic shark which emerged from a poster for Jaws 13. The ABBA-tars which graced the stage at the purpose built auditorium are far more realistic. If I didn’t know that pop group are in fact well into their 70s, I wouldn’t have believed that the stars in front of me were not really there.
To create this spectacle, ABBA recorded the vocals and dance moves in a theatre over the course of several months in early 2022. These performances were captured using specialised motion technology and used to build avatars. Experts at Industrial Light & Magic - one of the companies behind the performance - describe the process as extracting the “maths from the movement” and then feeding the “ones and zeroes” into a system which can build avatars to look like anything.
It’s the same sort of technology which was used to turn Andy Serkis into Gollum in Lord of the Rings in 2001 and is today used by Snapchat aficionados all over the world, to give their faces whiskers or make them look really old.
What makes ABBA Voyage unique is that it does not feel like we are watching the performance on a screen. The performers look solid, the piano looks like it is there and when Benny Anderson walks towards the front of the stage to tell the crowd that this is really him, we all believed him. In 2022 we don’t need Flux Capacitors to travel in time, advanced motion capture technology, a few hundred thousand LEDs and plenty of semiconductors will do the trick.…
