Tim Devine Featured at Augmented World Expo Virtual Reality Music Festival

Yanira D. Kivi May 28, 2022 3 min read

Music industry legend Tim Devine will visit a cutting-edge VR music festival hosted by XPR Labs at the Augmented World Expo on Thursday, showcasing a whole new side of live music.

The music festival, called Redwood Jam, is set to feature eight of VR’s top emerging indie talents, spanning genres from indie folk and acoustic guitar to EDM and opera singing. The show will take place in an immersive, purpose-built venue in the Metaverse, inspired by California’s redwood forests and the natural beauty of state parks.

Devine is a well-known figure in the music industry, having worked with major labels like Capitol Records and Columbia Records, where he signed artists like Lloyd Cole, Switchfoot and OneRepublic. He has also worked alongside some of the biggest names in music, including U2, Prince and the Beastie Boys, and is responsible for over $2 billion in global music sales.

Along with his vast background in music production, Devine is also a successful and highly capable businessman with experience in business development, marketing and financial management. Who better to introduce the next wave of virtual musicians in a cutting-edge high-tech field?

Devine will appear at the start of the show to introduce the first performer and kick off the day. It will be introduced by XPR Labs Communications Manager Sullivan Huebner, who led the team organizing the event and oversaw the development of the virtual venue.

“People have tried to do a music festival in VR before,” Huebner said. “The problem is that they tried to put everything from Coachella into the virtual environment right away – we’re starting much smaller, building a comfortable environment that’s fun, exciting and immersive for fewer users.” This particular venue, one of many in the XPR Labs catalog, focuses on bringing attendees directly to the stage, using careful environmental composition, user signage and special lighting effects.

“I wanted our visitors to feel like they had stumbled upon the festival in the middle of a clearing,” Huebner said. “This venue is really special and shows the potential of live music events in VR.”

Redwood Jam isn’t XPR Labs’ first foray into virtual reality, and this experiment shows it. “Bringing together a group of musicians to perform live in an entirely virtual environment — that’s mostly uncharted territory at this point,” Huebner said. “You need the right environment, the right developers, the right performers, and the right staff,” he said, “and I’m proud to represent the company that brings that experience to this new market.”

XPR Labs is a Quebec technology innovator specializing in enterprise applications for virtual reality. XPR seeks to integrate business and virtual reality, to create a sustainable and secure virtual business ecosystem. XPR produced JobCon 2021, a first-of-its-kind virtual reality HR conference that recorded over 60,000 visits.