Sofi Tukker Virtual World Visuals

Concert visuals created for Sofi Tukker the dynamic EDM duo from New York City, performed live at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 22, 2023, at the Empire Polo Club in Indio. The duo, consisting of Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern, delivered an electrifying 55-minute set that challenged Coachella attendees to beat the energy of the audience who saw them perform the night before in Mexico City via a scoring game developed by Xitelabs. The 55 minute show featured our cinematic visuals generated in real time using cutting edge game engine technology designed by Epic Games. We built and integrated existing works into a new super fun world. A rich, vibrant natural world with jellyfish, giraffe, alligators and an underwater world with alien avatar inspired plants and sea life.

CMH Design  lead by Cassady Halloran reached out to Epic Games to help find an expert in live XR for the upcoming Sofi Tukker performances using their new scenic and performance designs.  Given Xitelabs’ wealth of live XR music performances, running in engine, Xite was the perfect candidate.  The Sofi Tukker team and their Artist Management, Punk Da Funk  wanted us to create a diverse and highly performable 3D world for Coachella, Red Rocks and beyond on a very tight time table. Utilizing Unreal Engine 5.1, blender and mode3 on the grand MA Xitelabs we delivered a complete virtual world in under 1 month. 

Check out what the press had to say here:

Here are five rad things SOFI TUKKER did during their 55-minute set on Saturday at the Outdoor Theatre.

Coachella 2023: These are the 5 best DJ sets we watched across both weekends of the fest

Sofi Tukker plays their ‘White Lotus’ theme song remix at Coachella 2023

Sofi Tukker 2023

Experience the virtual world of Sofi Tukker

Our assignment was to take inspiration art provided by client built in cinema4D and transform into a real-time world running in Unreal Engine 5. This world needed to utilize a fully DMX controlled lighting system and be 100% dynamic. We also needed to control scenic art, narrative characters, timeline along with a virtual cinematic camera that has the ability to auto track location markers through the scene. This enabled very smooth movement and ability to keep virtual talent in frame elegantly. CMH Design and the onsite operations team could jump locations dynamically in the middle of the live performance, providing incredible custom real-time visuals.

We implemented a Resolume workflow as the primary media server host for an NDI passthrough from game live. Offworld Live tools enabled 4k 30fps transfer directly into Resolume while the engine was runnign on the same GPU. Using Mode 3 on grand MA and Resolume Arena an operator can adjust camera positions, environmental attributes, as well as control virtual lighting as you would any physical lighting – all turnkey, and all in real-time using Unreal Engine . Each song has a unique set of parameters preselected and programmed to timecode for ease of use, all programmed by our team. Utilizing engine features such as time of day, emissive lighting and complex geometries our team delivered a hyper-realistic, extremely flexible dynamic virtual world to amaze Sofi Tukker’s fans across the globe.

Sophie and Tucker requested a fun addition to their tour, they wanted to pit Cities and Festivals against each other to see which fan base had the best cheers and crowd participation. Xitelabs was asked to deliver a programmable Score Card, the parameters which could be set on the fly by the Lighting Director.

Xite took on this challenge, and over the course of 2 days had a completely customizable Resolume Wire Source effect that could be controlled from the clip panel of Resolume Arena.

Using Wire logic, as well as pre-rendered logos, this Score Board is now enjoyed by audiences every city Sofi Tukker performs at.