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Lang Lang plays holographic piano while his hologram plays a real piano / AV Magazine

Posted: March 27, 2024

Chinese virtuoso plays ‘haptic’ holographic piano concert. World-renowned Lang Lang played a holographic piano while his hologram ‘played’ a real piano, thanks to a 5G network and Musion 3D.

AV Magazine writes…..Lang Lang, has taken part in a holographic concert, celebrating the centenary of Spanish phone company Telefonica, and the opening of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The concert showed Lang Lang playing a ‘haptic’ hologram of a Steinway grand piano on the same stage as a hologram of the pianist appeared to be playing a real, self-playing Steinway Spirio grand piano.

The performance was only possible thanks to the 5G network jointly developed by Telefonica and Ericsson, with creative and technical contributions from Igor Studio and holographic projection specialist Musion.

Prior to the concert in Barcelona, a four-day test took place at Telefonica's headquarters in Madrid. Key technical challenges to be solved included:

Latency: To reduce end-to-end latency to the minimum for the audience of the more than 1,000, a private 5G network was a must. The collective latency of cameras filming Lang Lang, transmission to the video processor, live key-out, and processing through various components remained under 100 milliseconds.

Capacity: To capture the image of the real piano and pianist, Lang Lang, for hologram creation, three Haivision Pro 460 4K UHD encoders were deployed and routed over the Telefonica 5G network to a single Haivision Streamhub decoder. These codecs allowed local processing of the video before transfer to the other end (Streamhub decoder), reducing the impact on bandwidth over the 5G network. They were also used to transfer the audio signal, in this case without any treatment to keep the high-quality sound between the two pianos.

Filming: To generate the holograms on the stage of both Lang Lang and piano, three independent video images of Lang Lang (a full body shot in 4K UHD 60p and two overhead piano playing shots at 1080 HD 60p) were required. A full-sized video image of the ebony black Steinway holographic piano, courtesy of 10m x 4m Musion Eyeliner Foil and 1.5mm 4K UHD LED, creative lighting and detailed set design completed the video illusion.

A stacked Barco E2 processor applied and routed multiple layers of video,

This technical set up by Musion 3D enabled a complete immersive experience for the audience to enjoy: they witnessed Lang Lang seemingly playing a holographic piano with a “haptic effect” static keyboard on a 7m x 7m overhead LED wall whilst simultaneously a hologram of Lang Lang was seemingly playing a real piano with his fingers pressing the moving keys in perfect synchronisation.

Twin Panasonic PTZ cameras concurrently captured images of real Lang Lang at the holographic Steinway Piano A alongside holographic Lang Lang playing a real Steinway Spirio Piano B (right).

Sound was not an afterthought, and an adjustable delay was used for the best audio experience: Musion's sourced FA-9600 and EDA 2000 frame synchronisers allowed adjustments to video and audio delay independently, facilitating synchronisation between Lang Lang's piano audio and the hologram version of him playing the Spirio piano.

Musion 3D director Ian O’Connell commented: "“5G has come of age for us over this project. With cellular technology creating the necessary bandwidth for simultaneous ultra-low latency transmission of multiple large format 60p video signals in 4K and High Definition, together with audio data, the opportunities for touring 'remote' musical transmissions just became a giant step closer to commercial reality.”

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