MURDERED in 1997, at the age of 24, the Notorious B.I.G will come back to life, virtually, for a concert to be broadcast on December 16 on Facebook and Meta's VR platform. The songs that made the New York rapper famous will be performed by a hyper-realistic avatar.
Biggie's avatar will perform in a virtual recreation of 1990s Brooklyn called ‘The Brook’. This metaverse was created by start-ups Burst and Surreal Events, to allow music lovers to immerse themselves "in the world of one of the greatest MC's of all time".
Biggie fans will need a virtual reality headset to access ‘The Brook’ through Meta's Horizon Worlds platform. They will then be immersed for a day in the life of the legendary rapper through a story written and told by journalist and music critic Toure.
The experience will culminate in an all-new concert produced in collaboration with the American rapper's estate manager.
The Notorious BIG avatar will perform some of his classics like ‘Ready to Die’, ‘Juicy’ and ‘Sky's the Limit’ with the help of Sean Combs, The Lox, Latto, Nardo Wick, Lil' Cease and DJ Clark Kent.
"It's amazing to create new content for BIG. The world was robbed of an opportunity to watch Biggie grow and evolve as an artist.
"The wonder of Web3 is that it gives us an opportunity to celebrate his music with visuals that Biggie never got to make," said Mark Pitts, president of RCA Records and Biggie's former manager, in a statement relayed by Variety.
Music lovers who don't have a virtual reality headset will be able to watch the concert in 2D on the official Notorious BIG Facebook page.
But Meta, the parent company of the social network, hopes that this musical experience will revive interest in the metaverse, this three-dimensional virtual world, which, according to Mark Zuckerberg, could become humanity's new frontier.
This technological project has already cost the group 21 billion dollars, to the displeasure of Wall Street – the proof being the collapse of Meta's share price by nearly 20% in after-hours trading on the New York Stock Exchange on October 26, after the announcement of the company's disastrous quarterly results.
Added to this is the not-very-encouraging emptiness of Horizon Worlds, Meta's metaverse lab. According to the Wall Street Journal, it counts no more than around 200,000 visits per month, compared with an initial goal of 500,000.
Mark Zuckerberg's firm has recently tried to populate it with immersive experiences like ‘Eli Roth's Haunted House: Trick-VR-Treat’, starring Vanessa Hudgens, and another based on Jordan Peele's film ‘Nope’. – ETX Daily Up, November 18, 2022
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