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Music

Boiler Room Is Launching a Virtual Reality Club in London Early Next Year

They've made the leap into the emerging sector of music technology.
Image courtesy of Boiler Room

London-based events and broadcasting company, Boiler Room, announced plans today to launch a virtual reality venue. Boiler Room has long focused on using internet streaming to broadcast live music events and the venue marks a serious foray into VR, which is an emerging sector in music technology.

While details are scant, Boiler Room have announced that the venue will be located in London and open in early 2017. VR company Inception will help out with the technical side of things, which has previously worked with the EDM musicians Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike by creating interactive VR music videos for their songs "Arcade" and "Higher Place." Content recorded at the VR venue will be available to stream via Inception apps for Samsung Gear VR, iOS, and Android.

"We've always been driven by using technology to showcase the music we care about and give fans all around the world an authentic experience of the events and scenes they can't be part of in person." said Boiler Room Founder and CEO Blaise Bellville in the press release. "Building the first ever music venue born for VR is a big evolution of that, creating immersive online experiences that bring people even closer to what it's like being at a sweaty rave or an amazing concert half-way across the world."

Previously, people who bought tickets to this year's Coachella festival were given a VR headset with access to a virtual tour of the event grounds, as well as interviews and performances by artists from the festival. Meanwhile, iHeartRadio and Universal Media Group announced in June that they would bring virtual reality to a handful of concerts in 2016. Just before that, in May, NextVR teamed up with Live Nation for a similar initiative, and their next VR concert will be broadcasted before the end of this year. Coldplay was an early adopter of the technology, releasing a virtual reality concert in 2014.

It may just be in plain old 2-D, but Mixpak's Jubilee shared a scintillating Boiler Room set today, accompanied with an interview for the occasion of the release of her debut album After Hours.

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