Paris-based production studio, BackLight specializes in entertainment content for the LBE market, being both present in arcades (in Europe or at Area15 in Las Vegas) but also on more artistic projects such as Blanca Li’s LE BAL DE PARIS – awarded at the Venice Film Festival 2021. Back on the promise of a very physical VR on the occasion of the release of their latest experience ASCENDERS, with its co-founder Frederic Lecompte.
2008 – 2010, first step
Frédéric Lecompte – BackLight is almost a graduation project! I created the company in 2008 with Jonathan Tamene (see our interview on LE BAL DE PARIS), whom I met in a video game studio where I was an intern, Gimagin. And it’s at the same place that we met most of the people who were going to make up BackLight (and are still there!), most of them coming from the Institut Supérieur des Arts Appliqués (LISAA). We were mainly making licensed games, which was very formative but we were already imagining something else. After my internship, I still wanted to work in the video game industry, but I wanted to innovate and be very close to the production teams. I even refused an internship at Nintendo!
F. L. – So we teamed up with Jonathan to found BackLight (the name was coined by our director Jonathan Astruc) – in the midst of a financial crisis. We wanted to produce good digital content, 3D, in a context where these productions were increasingly called upon for brands and institutions. This was also an opportunity to prove the quality of our work within the constraints of budget and production. It was a real chance to move on to more artistic projects.
F. L. – In 2008, we immediately specialized in pre-calculated animation and special effects for digital productions and mainly online advertising. We have now delivered 400 projects in 15 years, all media included. But in 2008 we got closer to a French company already leader in augmented reality, called Total Immersion (closed in 2014). With our experience in video games and real time, we started to collaborate with them, to produce assets including AR constraints. And that was the beginning of smartphones!
2010 – 2014, virtual reality is here!
F. L. – In 2010, we became partners of Total Immersion, and BackLight was able to start developing its own AR applications. We hired our first employee, Frédéric Plantard, now technical director, to work on these projects. It was in this movement that we were able to test the Oculus DK1 in 2013, and see the opportunities it could offer – with a touch of frustration about the lack of interactivity. We got in touch with them, and received a development kit so we could prototype. The arrival of the DK2 and its tracking camera was a real change for us as a creative potential but also from some customers.
F. L. – At that point, we decided to put one of our prototypes into production – BIRDY KING LAND, which was released in December 2014 – and allowed us to sign several commissions. The studio gradually migrated to XR; we ended purely animation and VFX commissions in 2018. We had reached the right time to focus on XR, with the confidence that our creative skills were mature enough. And the market was relatively ready, between Pokémon Go introducing AR to the world, and the first VR experiences for brands. The institutional productions, or brand content, allowed us to specialize and acquire enough autonomy.
2017 – 2020, long live the LBE !
F. L. – The LBE trend was identified fairly quickly. For entertainment venues, it was an opportunity to diversify their content, their offerings. As early as 2017, after much discussion with theme parks and escape game rooms, we signed ECLIPSE. Location-based is the organic continuity of our previous work. Between video game, animation, real time engine, we had the right toolbox. And a frustration of not being able, until then, to be totally free to live the experiences! The arrival of the HTC Vive was very beneficial for that. All these technological developments, we integrated them into our “hyper-reality” pipeline (increasing the virtual experience through haptic devices of the real environment: vibrating floors, ventilation… etc.) as early as 2015 at the Paris Air Show (link).
F. L. – These first tests convinced us that this was what we wanted to explore creatively and in terms of production. One of our best experiences to date remains DIESEL – ONLY THE BRAVE in 2017, where the viewer finds himself 50 floors above the ground… A pretty amazing sensation while having both feet on solid ground! To propose a complete immersion, we need to stimulate several senses – and not only sight or sound, through different haptics available (vibrations, free roaming…). This is a know-how that we have developed for entertainment. ECLIPSE is available as an “at home” experience or in simple arcades (+120 today in the world use it like that), but the real experience is totally interactive and 4D with dedicated haptic supports, and free roaming (without teleportation). This is our real goal: we want people to escape and forget the virtual reality helmet on their head.
2020 – …, LE BAL DE PARIS, AREA15 and… Covid
F. L. – The Covid years were dramatic; we are still paying for the shutdown of the LBE operation – even if the network has started up again with good indicators. We had obviously invested a lot in free roaming entertainment: with entertainment rooms, event services and point-of-sale animation, and we had also invested directly in locations. There was also potential internationally with large budgets under discussion at the time. Everything came to an abrupt halt in the spring of 2020, without much visibility for the future. But we held on, thanks in particular to government aid, and we organized ourselves to continue the projects in production. The following two years were complicated (we had to turn down all co-production projects to focus on our own experiences, services or brand content for Disney and other brands) but things have been picking up since 2022 with the rise of the XR, the success of Blanca Li’s BAL DE PARIS and the “metaverse” buzz.
F. L. – The implementation of an OZ Experience room at AREA15, a complex dedicated to immersion near Las Vegas, was decided in spring 2020, just after the confinements. It opened in December 2020, and has been open until mid-2021, using our content (notably ECLIPSE). We are close to 100,000 spectators over this period, and a proof-of-value of our OZ Experience concept: the reunion of our entire LBE catalog, which illustrates our vision of immersion. We were lucky enough to have a very visited venue, on a premium model, which allowed us to make this operation profitable.
F. L. – Today, OZ Experience is the brand that exploits our entertainment content, with a network of partner theaters. OZ has about 15 experiences: 5 installations and about 10 licenses. But our ambition is clearly to open an OZ Experience room that we could operate directly to develop this activity, integrate our package and open it to other producers. We want it to be open to everyone, with a guiding line in terms of quality of immersion.
BackLight announces OZ EXPERIENCE, an all-in-one entertainment LBE catalog
F. L. – Standardization is a central issue for Location Based. This is a discussion that we have with French XR studios within our association French Immersive Studios (link), which focuses more on artistic and heritage experiences. XR is one of the axes integrated in the France 2030 plan that the government has put in place, and we have been widely consulted on these points. In the XR value chain, it is clearly distribution and exploitation that remain the weak links. In production, France is already among the market leaders. We now need to be able to “crack” the distribution code to create value. This is a blocking point.
F. L. – The potential of the LBE is there. But we don’t yet have accurate data on the state of the network after Covid. At BackLight, for example, we have a technology platform that allows us to track the performance of our experiments that are in operation, and to secure them – but this remains fragmented compared to the overall market. With the democratization of headsets and new dedicated venues, we need to be able to keep pace. And we need to talk to the arcades, which will have to develop a loyal audience and renew their experiences. Since the end of 2021, we feel that the momentum is there.
BackLight, à suivre
F. L. – We are having a great year 2022 so far. Beyond our traditional projects for brands, we are very proud of 2 of our recent creations, the Flight over France with FLYVIEW (link) in Paris, and most recently an XR experience on TV with French broadcaster Gulli and the show “Mission Gulliverse” (link).
More info: https://backlight.fr/xrprojects/
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.