IBC Accelerator tests spatial audio and VR for remote festival audiences
A live festival now has two audiences: the crowd in the room, and everyone watching from somewhere else.
A live festival now has two audiences: the crowd in the room, and everyone watching from somewhere else.
At this summer's Montreux Jazz Festival, an IBC Accelerator project called IFeL tested what closing that gap actually takes. Prototype ambisonic microphones from Shure, a stage-mounted 180-degree camera and 360-degree cameras around the crowd fed a spatial audio and VR headset setup, letting remote viewers pick their own vantage point of a Vulfpeck set and hear the mix shift with it. The project was proposed by SMPTE and MIT Reality Hack, with broadcaster ITV and several UK universities among the backers, and shows at IBC2026 in Amsterdam this September.
The interesting part is not the headset. It is the microphone array - audio built to stay spatially accurate as the viewpoint changes, instead of a flat mix bolted onto a 360-degree video feed.
Remote audiences have always gotten the worse seat. The infrastructure to fix that is now being built by broadcasters and standards bodies, not just startups.
