Coachella is one of the year’s most popular and well-attended festivals, but that doesn’t mean that every fan can get to the California desert in the middle of April. But now, thanks to a collaborative VR partnership with Vantage.tv, Coachella is making a live stream of this year’s festival events available to fans at home on their couches. Through a Coachella VR app, fans far away will be able to get all kinds of virtual reality experiences, from festival history to desert preparation and the live sets themselves.
To help attendees prepare, the Coachella VR app will offer a virtual tour of the festival grounds and desert layout. But the rest of the app features are extremely attractive to anyone looking for a live stream of Coachella events, without the sand and crowds. The app’s video library includes recorded performances from popular acts so that fans can get caught up before the shows. And the most appealing feature has got to be a live stream of the top Coachella performers in three-dimensional VR, and 360 degree panoramic format.
Coachella isn’t the first high profile event to make the move to publicly available VR footage. Plenty of sports and entertainment brands have enabled VR streaming in recent months, including the NFL, the NCAA, and even Six Flags. Of course, VR access to a festival like Coachella could be a game changer, both for the festival scene and for the highly ambitious field of virtual reality technology.
Vantage.tv does bill itself as a pioneer “at the forefront in the field of Virtual Reality”, so hope is strong that the VR content will be high quality, totally immersive, and filmed in 360 degree format. The app features that are available in VR will be viewable with Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR, and other virtual reality headsets. And that’s definitely better than watching your friends’ Coachella desert snapchats enviously from your couch back home.
