Building an immersive karaoke

Everybody loves karaoke! But no one ever has cool photos or videos to relive their moment of glory as they are screaming the lyrics of their favorite song through the mic. We wanted to build a karaoke that immerses the singers into the song and allows them to record a real clip.

Concept

The usual photos of a group of friends in a karaoke bar are photos of 4 persons’ backs and a small screen that shows lyrics. If you’re lucky the bar has a nice décor but that’s about it. Was there really no way of making lasting memories that look way cooler and couldn’t we just make it a little bit more fun? Well, this is an example of a great challenge for our team. Main question: how can we keep the fun karaoke experience, but make it a next-level thing that helps produce longer-lasting content?

The lyrics are not the most fun part of karaoke, it’s the part where you fully engage in a song. And the best way to do that is to…make your own video clip. So that was the starting point of our idea: a karaoke booth that will make visitors produce their own videoclip and of course shows the lyrics.

Process

The first idea was to create a half dome, so you would literally stand inside the clip. With the right projectors and screens this set-up would be perfect for our purposes. We wanted to test the karaoke on a two-day conference so we could see the response of our audience. This environment, however, made it difficult to use the materials that we wanted. The half dome requested a lot of time for set-up (read cost a lot of money to be installed). So we went back to the drawing board.

That is when our partner in crime, AED, came with a great solution. Why not make it square, but use a LED floor as well. How immersive can a karaoke be? AED made sure they found the newest and most impressive materials to create the best experience.

We took the idea to another partner, Sonhouse. The karaoke would serve as an activation booth for Telenet, the brand with a smile. Sonhouse carefully selected 12 songs that matched that brand and reflected its identity. With those songs we came to the final part of the concept: creating the clips.

Every song had a reference to happiness or a smile. We wanted all of our visuals to align with that idea and to contain bright and flashy colors, with elements that moved to the beat. We collected images that matched every song and put them together in coherent moodboards. Each moodboard reflected the core of the song. Our designer then transformed these moodboards to moving images for all three walls ànd the LED floor.

Realization

Theoretically speaking we were done. But everybody knows it’s not finished until it actually works. After a full day of set-up we were proud to see a four by four LED floor, cooled so you didn’t come off of it as a fried egg, with three two-meters-high black screens on the sides. Three Panasonic projectors were lifted in the middle of the booth. To top it off, we had a nice screen in the booth to show the lyrics and a transparent LED screen to let the visitors select the song of their choice. Impressive to say the least.

And then it was time to test the content… That was the tricky part, because we couldn’t test the content before, because the set-up was too expensive to try it before the actual event. After everything was tweaked, installed and loaded…. It magically worked!

Results

Well, let’s say the photos say it all. The karaoke was a huge success. Not just because everyone likes karaoke, but most of all because it just makes people escape from reality for just a little bit and has them sing and dance with friends in the most amazing karaoke they have ever seen. *wink*

Learnings

Doing the karaoke project was amazing. It was developed in a timeframe of only 1,5 months. Learning number one: time is never on your side. The more you have of it, the better. The proof of concept here was a success, and if we dedicate just a little more time to it now, we can make it a real showstopper. Ideas? Talk to us!

Learning number two: it seems obvious but sometimes we forget. The more areas you need to cover, the more materials you need to develop. We kind of lost sight of the fact that the flood needed different images than the walls, to break the whole view a little. But all of this design work takes time and then it all needs to work together too. When there is no time for mock-ups, it can be a challenge to see how everything will look and if it will turn out the way you had in mind. For us, luckily it did.

Learning number three: people still love karaoke. It was fun and we would do it again anytime. Interested in our karaoke or would you like to get some help with other crazy ideas? We are happy to help!