LOG ENTRY 011
The First Week
Every great expedition begins with a single step. Mine began at Waters Edge, Dundee.
When I packed my life into a van and headed north to Dundee, I wasn't just changing my address. I was changing direction. Looking back now, I realise that my first week at Waters Edge wasn't simply about settling into a new office or learning my way around a new city. It was the week that Terra Nueva stopped being an idea I'd carried around in my head for years...and started becoming something real.
To understand why that first week mattered so much, I need to rewind a little. Six years earlier, the live entertainment industry came to a complete standstill. Concerts disappeared overnight. Tour buses stopped rolling. Venue doors were locked. Artists suddenly had nowhere to perform. Production crews lost work. Promoters watched years of planning vanish almost overnight. Like everyone else in our industry, I spent those early weeks asking myself one question.
What can we do?
Waiting for things to return to normal didn't feel like enough. I came to the conclusion that, as an industry, we had to find new ways to support artists, venues and the incredible crews working behind the scenes. That was the moment House of Tours Global began to evolve. I had always been about moving artists around the world. Now I needed to help move performances beyond the walls of a venue. We created our own livestream platform and started producing online concerts. Not because we believed livestreaming would ever replace live music. It never will. But because it could keep audiences connected with artists, give musicians somewhere to perform and help venues and production teams continue doing what they loved during one of the most difficult periods our industry had ever experienced.
Looking back now, I realise something else was happening. Without really knowing it... The foundations of the Triple Live Experience were being laid.
A few years later, while exploring volumetric live capture in Bristol, that idea became much bigger. What if a performance didn't have to exist in just one place? What if it could exist simultaneously for the audience inside the venue...For viewers watching around the world...And as a fully immersive digital performance? That question never left me. Technology wasn't quite ready. But I believed one day it would be.
Fast forward to my first week in Dundee. Within days of arriving at Waters Edge, I found myself walking through the doors of the CoSTAR Realtime Lab and Abertay University's ViPRE (Virtual Production Research Environment) Studio. Suddenly, I wasn't talking about ideas anymore. I was surrounded by people with the knowledge, facilities and enthusiasm to begin testing them. For the first time, the Triple Live Experience wasn't just a vision. It became research and development.
Our first objective was simple. Capture a live performer. Not inside a laboratory. But in a way that could eventually work on a real stage. Our performer was scanned to create a digital MetaHuman before entering Abertay University's ViPRE Studio motion capture space. Instead of using the traditional grey Lycra motion capture suit covered in reflective markers, we deliberately attached the markers directly to the performer's stage clothes and skin. If this technology is ever going to become part of live music, it needs to work with musicians performing naturally. Not dressed like motion capture technicians.
One of our first concerns was whether theatrical lighting would interfere with the infrared camera system. We tested low-light conditions. We introduced stage lighting. We pushed the system as far as we could. It worked. That was our first breakthrough. Next came the real challenge. Moving into the CoSTAR Realtime Lab, we placed the performer in front of the LED wall with a guitar in hand.
Again, we attempted to capture the performance using reflective markers attached to clothing. The results were fascinating. More importantly...They were honest. For live music performance, marker-based motion capture wasn't the answer. The markers shifted. The equipment restricted natural movement. The headset proved cumbersome for a performer playing live. In R & D, discovering what doesn't work is often just as valuable as discovering what does.
By the end of those first sessions, we'd reached a clear conclusion. The future of live performance capture lies in markerless motion capture. That wasn't the only lesson we learned. Three years earlier, we'd explored volumetric capture in Bristol. Now another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.
Rather than choosing one technology over another, perhaps the future lies in combining them. Volumetric Capture. Markerless Motion Capture. Artificial Intelligence. Gaussian Splatting. Each technology solving a different challenge. Together, creating something none of them could achieve alone. The Triple Live Experience has always consisted of three connected elements. The live performance. The livestream. And the live digital capture.
The livestream element continues to evolve through our recent productions with Lounges.TV, building upon the experience we gained producing livestreams during the pandemic through House of Tours Global. The final destination, however, reaches far beyond simply broadcasting a concert online.
Our ambition is to create virtual venues and digital twins, allowing audiences around the world to experience performances together inside immersive shared environments. Not replacing live entertainment. Extending it. People often ask whether technology will ever replace the atmosphere of standing in front of a stage. My answer is always the same. No. Nothing will ever replace the feeling of live music. The lights. The sound. The anticipation. The connection between artist and audience. Technology should never replace that experience. Its role is to preserve it. Extend it. Share it with more people. And make it accessible to those who otherwise could never be there. That has always been the vision behind Terra Nueva.
Looking back now, it's extraordinary to think that all of this began during my very first week at Waters Edge. At the time, they were simply meetings. Conversations. Experiments. Tests. Today, I see them differently. They were the first real footsteps of Terra Nueva. The first time a vision that had evolved over six years began to take physical shape.
The expedition had finally left the harbour with a lot of R & D ahead!
The journey continues... 🌍
Next Log: Lessons from the Lab
"Every breakthrough begins with the courage to test an idea that might not work."
Stu