now it's click. we are mave! this week, we're at the gig of the future where the bands are not as they seem. i'm at a gig, but i'm not at a gig. or where you'd expect. we're in a hobbit hole. it gets weirder. -

this is very strange. but how much control do you really want over your pop idols? so what happens when you tweak the nostrils? 0h! liverpool is getting ready to host the biggest music event on earth. eurovision is coming to town, and this city is about to become the centre of the music universe. it's an amazing event in an amazing place — one which gave us the greatest four—piece band of all time. so which one�*s benny and which one�*s bjorn? laughs. you're going to get so much abuse for that. i know, i'm regretting it already. but anyway, welcome to the british music experience. this is an immensely colourful journey through the british pop scene from 1945 to now, and where every hour, on the hour, a hologram boy george plays live.

# karma, karma, karma, karma karma chameleon... # liverpool's hosting eurovision on behalf of ukraine. and in amongst the memorabilia, here's the outfit that helped the uk sparkle last year. there's plenty of interactive stuff here. you can find a musical link to wherever you're from in the uk. and there are lessons for dancers and budding musicians... ..of which we are neither. ah, take that and the spice girls — i remember when they were new and exciting. every generation has their idols, and they were mine. and the brilliant thing about music is it's always looking for new and exciting, and the next big thing. and the latest batch of idols, well, they need to be seen to be believed.

from travis scott to ariana grande tojustin bieber — pop stars are entering the so—called metaverse, performing virtually on pixelated stages they'll never physically set foot on. and hollywood is leading the charge. it's home to capture studios like wave and yoom that digitally scan artists and teleport them to online audiences around the world. today, with this technology, we're actually able to bring the actual artists, process themselves into a photorealistic performance. they use eight camera rigs, 32 motion sensors, 48 led lights, and four infrared projectors to capture sd shapes and textures. so the playback looks more like a sd video than an animation. it's notjust their song that you like. you also like to see how they move and how they express the music, and their body position and their body movement, their facial expressions. yoom puts on festivals

where concert—goers can gather at certain showtimes, wander about and have a chat with other fans if they fancy. oh, that's me — hi! so hold on, if i walk up to this chap, what are they doing? create voice chat zone... to attend, you just need a web browser. half of the population of internet, so we're talking about four billion people potentially with the access to these music concerts. but is this just a fad amidst waning metaverse hysteria? the percentage of people gaming versus watching tv is really incomparable. i mean, we're seeing that shift coming up. if we look at where audience are and where audience are consuming content, this is where we want to bring the music. nothing can replace the live concert, but it's expensive for fans, for musicians to travel. icelandic artist margret ran of electronic group gusgus has received the technical treatment for her virtual tour. this isjust so nice to be able to, you know, go to your computer

and immediately connect just like this, from wherever in the world. because i haven't been to japan. i mean, i live in iceland, in a small island in the atlantic ocean. so this is exciting for me to see an artist that maybe lives in korea, and i can see them from iceland. for the artist, it's really opening a new opportunity for revenue, a new opportunity for promotion, a new opportunity for expansion of their art and creation into the worldwide audience that is really today logging into interactive spaces and looking for content. and of course, you have a captive audience keen to buy digital merch. travis scott reportedly made around $20 million for his nine—minute—long concert in fortnite. other acts are embracing virtual worlds in unique ways. the uk's miro shot is an exploratory halfway house between physical and digital.

they play their music live on stage whilst the audience wear mixed—reality headsets, seeing the band sometimes, whilst at others being immersed in computer—generated visuals. in a part of a song that you feel should be spacey or you should send them to somewhere else, we can send them to the alps, or we can put them in a motel that's somewhere in wisconsin. and you can kind of... really, it's the same decisions you make when you're making a music video. the song already has its own energy state. i'm ata gig, but i'm not at a gig. but i'm at a gig, but i'm not at a gig. the band has been using vr for a while now, but as the tech evolves, so does the show. the visual fidelity of these headsets is super clear, so it's almost like having a triple—a gaming experience in a live music performance. what technology can do is bring the artist's imagination to life. but the show will never be about the technology, it's always going to be

about what the experience will be. it's quite strange experience actually, going to see a real live performance, a real—world gig, but also see a virtual cityscape. any artist will want to use tools that can say something new or say something else. so for us, it's just this amazing new palette of colours to paint with. that was nick. and it's not only western musicians that are feeling the need to have virtual versions of themselves. k—pop group aespa also took to a virtual stage at south by southwest. k—pop is known for constructing its bands — from picture—perfect appearances to impeccable behaviour, idols are made to be flawless. and now, some have been taken to the next level. this is eternity, and these are not real faces.

whilst professional singers provide the voices and different dancers perform the routines, theirfaces are swapped out for ones generated by ai, which were selected by a public vote. although face—swapping software is fairly automated these days, it's the job of technical artists like shin seunho to make the videos as perfect as possible. # are you keeping it real? # the technology's not perfect, so sometimes we have to manually catch those frames and... so you have the characters dancing and their face starts wandering off to one side. don't you just hate it when your face goes wandering off to one side? not too far away, also in the city of seoul, the band mave have gone one better. we are mave! their bodies are also computer—generated, and they come with a suitably futuristic back story. translation: four young girls from udipia, a future city - where emotions have been eliminated, crashland in the modern day in search of hopes and dreams.

right then... you can turn her eyes. so what happens when you tweak the nostrils? 0h! you don't have to touch it. and get this — members of both bands don'tjust perform in pre—recorded videos, they can appear live too. translation: every morning, i report on stories about al - for broadcaster sbs, and i've also been reporting on different food cultures from around the world. well, i'm sat here with jane, not jane. and what's weird is i can see this person's real face. but you can't, because by the time you watch this, jane's face will have been deep—faked on top. and even over there, i can see jane on my reference screen.

this is alljust completely weird. jane, hello. so, the big question — why? why go to all of this trouble when you have perfectly good human performers around? translation: well, as the virtual human| and influencer industry expands, what is often brought up is that virtual humans will never age and that there will never be scandals. translation: furthermore, unlike real idols, virtual- idols do not need sleep and can exist anywhere and everywhere. although at the moment, the singers' faces are essentially being animated by hand, one of the hopes is that in the future they could plop someone in this chair and get them to say a load of words, and the footage from these

cameras will be fed into a computer to allow an al to learn what emotions and what facial expressions go with what combination of words. and that means that the singers' facial expressions can be automated simply based on the song lyrics. yes, in the future, mave could take on a life of their own. translation: already there's a lot of content j being produced by ai technology, like chatgpt. so i do think there will come a day when mave will be able to talk for themselves, sing by themselves, and even compose songs by themselves. in the near future, they could be personalised, ithink, so that, you know, it might be possible to have your mave. she might know about your personal things like, you know, if you fight with your father yesterday, then the day after,

she might be possible to ask you about, you know, how's your father? so we're notjust talking about a pop band now, we're talking about some sort of, like, virtualfriend who... yeah. this is really the realm of fantasy now. this is like your favourite pop star also turns up on a video call and starts talking to you about your personal problems. yeah, right. all of this begs the question, how are human performers meant to live up to these perfectly curated beauty standards and talents? translation: for instance, just like how mickey mouse l is still a popular and active character, i also hope mave will be recognised as an iconic character like mickey mouse. this might either be creepy or dreamy — the end of human creativity or the beginning of a new creative era. where you stand on this may depend on your age, might depend on your music tastes. so ask yourself this — what would your ideal

pop idol look like? ok, time for a look at this week's tech news now. the uk's competition watchdog has blocked microsoft's proposed plan to buy gaming giant activision blizzard. the competition and markets authority said it's concerned that the $68.7 billion deal would reduce innovation and consumer choice in the fast—growing cloud gaming sector. the theory is that cloud gaming will eventually become the kind of de facto distribution way that games are distributed to the end user. what do you think of this? it's a mouth—based touchpad. augmental�*s mouthpad can connect to smartphones or laptops via bluetooth and allows people who can't use hands—on touchpads to navigate digital interfaces using one that's literally on the tip of their tongue. ukraine says it's ramping

up its homegrown drone production to meet demand on the front line. the expansion is backed by its army of drones campaign, which has raised over £87 million since lastjuly. and finally, a new study suggests that video calls could help pet parrots feel less lonely. yes, research by scientists at the university of glasgow and northeastern university saw us parrot owners help their pets video call others, also saw them engage in more social behaviour, like preening, playing and singing. i wonder whether they tweet, too? electronic instrumental. it's time to get the band back together. and if you're wondering where they are, they're in this flashing box. i've been promised a gateway

to an immersive virtual studio where musicians can collaborate in a new kind of real—time. now, while artists like the weeknd are experimenting with virtual performances, mixing music production with the metaverse is something that hasn't happened before. with the onset of the pandemic, interacting with work colleagues and family via video conference calls quickly became the new normal. and musicians, used to jamming with one another in the same studio, were also forced to use these same platforms. but making music together online doesn't really work. it's because of something called — wait for it — latency. see, it takes a certain amount of time for sound to travel, and the further away you are, the longer it takes. and while you might not notice that lag in a room like this, you certainly would online. latency is essentially

the time it takes for data, or in this case audio, to pass from one point on a network to another. and although this data is traveling at the speed of light, delays or high latency can still be an issue. we ran this series of workshops to explore the possibility of using lower—latency technology offered by wireless communication, like 56, for having remote collaboration between actors and musicians. and we have heard from people involved, and these were both actors and musicians, that while these 5—7 milliseconds were completely negligible for the actors, it bothered the musicians. when it came to audio, it played an important role in giving them less than perfect experience, basically. enter the scenekey, developed by a company called meloscene. it's essentially a device that imports music made

with real—world instruments to a vr studio. it allows for instantaneous cooperation between collaborators anywhere in the world. this is one ofjust four prototypes in existence, and for the first time, all four are going to be connected simultaneously. i'll be jamming with other musicians, logging in from west london, los angeles and amsterdam. this is very strange. we're in a hobbit hole. this is very, very... it gets weirder. it looks great. although i have one criticism that's playing with the reality of a music studio, which is the sofa is far too clean. where are the coffee rings? way too clean in here! i had a kind of rough idea of like 120, 130bpm, somewhere inside there, mid to up—tempo. hey, how about this, boss, obviously, since you're the producer — will you guide what you want and drop files and all that? yeah, sure, sure. 120, i'll start some

chords, maybe. we'll default to you. ok, cool. i'll turn my headset down and i'm going to hop - on my kit really quick. all right, i'm going to do the same. oh, that's nice. 0h! i like the fact that everyone's avatars are bobbing their heads, like proper sound engineer types. can we make those notes shorter, so more staccato at the top — the ding, ding, ding? a whole hour flew by in the low—latency virtual studio. and before i knew it, it was time to head back to the real world. i'm back. i don't want to be — i want to be back in here. it's freezing cold where we're filming, and my fingers are completely numb, but i'm somehow managing to forget about that inside this sort of la—type cool music studio. yeah, i'm surprised. but my fingers are freezing.

i travelled to the other side of london to meet one of my collaborators face—to—face. so i could see some people watching this and they might think, hang on, ijust need a sound card or a computer and an internet connection. most people are going away from pcs and just using tablets to do the majority of their stuff. but mobile processing can't handle the heavy workloads. so when people want to get into music, they're having to buy a $2,000 computer or whatever, they have to buy the interface. all these things to get going, whereas we're putting it all in one box. you could tell i was really enjoying myself in there. yes, a little bit. but i could also tell that it's a work in progress still. it must have been quite frustrating when things kept falling over. oh, my gosh. it's a very large endeavour to kind of bridge the gap between hardware, software, internet, remote collaboration, all that. so one of the ways that we've done it for the prototype, the very, very beginning, is that we're just having to use... we're basicallyjust patching it through third—party software.

and so we're at the mercy of the third—party software companies, which is why we're building our own system that specifically is for audio and art and creativity, things like that. everything is mapped out on how to solve it. that's probably the most frustrating thing, having the design of your supercar and all you have is like an old beater. even with the issues on the day, i was genuinely excited by the scenekey�*s premise, helping musicians to collaborate in real—time, wherever we are. that was lj. right, let's go back in time to see what was happening in the music news of 1953, shall we? look, british jazz trumpeter ken colyer introduced the new orleans jazz sounds to this country. everest was conquered. but i think probably the biggest news, from this small isle at least, was the coronation of queen elizabeth ii. and now, 70 years on, all eyes and ears are on london for the coronation of king charles. beaming a live event like that across the world is no mean feat. so alasdair keane's been

taking a look at some of the technology that's being used. newsreel: the world's finest equipment will be used, including the largest telephoto lens in the world and a zoom lens which cost over £1,000, to bring the complete magnificent spectacle to this theatre... 1953, and the coronation of queen elizabeth ii was a huge moment for the technology behind broadcasting. fast forward 70 years and, while the coronation of king charles might not be sending people to the shops to buy their first tv, it is seeing new tech being rolled out to broadcast the events in london to screens right around the world. it's here at the site of loch lomond in scotland, more than 400 miles away from buckingham palace, that a network that will connect many of the cameras is being put through its final testing. think of it as popping on a bubble of private sg wireless connectivity.

and then what we are doing at the coronation is to allow the international broadcast community the ability for their cameras tojump on our 56 network all the way down the mall. it's really to give freedom of movement for some of the newscasters who might want to go into the crowds, almost unscripted, and do interviews with participants. cameras and their quality is getting better and better. and that means, for live broadcasting, they need a really good connection. this technology allows that over a wider area, meaning me and the camera operator can be remote and still send that good quality all around the world. this is basically an entire 56 network in a couple of boxes. so in this unit here, we've got a computer, this is running our 56 software stack and also the core network. there's a radio head in that box. there's an antenna up here. and that's the whole

56 network. at the moment, we're passing video data through this. we've got a camera over there, which is streaming through the network, breaks out of our core and goes into our video receiver box. and that's the video feed that we can see on the screen here. this creates the network, but the cameras have got to be linked to it somehow. talk us through what's on the camera. yes, i mean, this is a sort of homebrew encoder that we've built up, called the haggis cam. there's a video feed coming out of this camera, going into an encoder box that lives in here. we've then got a small computer which is connecting back to the 56 network, and that computer also enables bidirectional internet connectivity. so back in some central office, the producer can zoom the camera in and out, change the settings and all that kind of stuff. so basically we can take this to anywhere and literally in five minutes pop up a network. from a phone, you can connect to a 56 network. what's different about what you provide? as soon as you get a large, large number of people who participate in the venue,

you suddenly notice that, even though you've got your ag or your 56, the performance of that degrades heavily. and we want to control that, we don't want everybody else being able to access our network because they'lljust steal resources, effectively, from the communication channel. we've come a long way in 70 years, but the king's coronation will still be the biggest test of this 56 tech yet. that was alasdair, and that's all we've got time for from the british music experience in liverpool. yeah, thanks for watching. and if you'll excuse us, we've got a dance to learn. hello. on saturday, the temperature

reached 20 degrees celsius in a few locations across the uk. but in northern england and parts of scotland, it felt chilly. sunday will feel a little warmer in these areas, but we are expecting some showers. and if we have a look at the satellite picture, there's a lot of cloud lurking around the uk. you can see it here, particularly around western areas. but the air is coming in from the south. it's a relatively mild air mass. this is what that yellow colour is indicating. so a milder current of air all the way from the southern climes. here's the forecast then for the early hours, an extensive cloud with showers right from the word go, not necessarily in east anglia and the south—east here. we will have had clear spells overnight. it's also a little colder in london and norwich, around 4, 5, 6 degrees, but plenty of cloud and showers through the morning into the afternoon. let's have a look at a snapshot at 2pm. so across scotland, you can see where the showers are in the western isles, some in central scotland,

a few in the lowlands. thunderstorms possible in the afternoon across northern ireland, even some downpours, showers around merseyside, into lancashire, parts of wales, the south—west of england and one or two showers brewing elsewhere. but notice the extreme south—east, east anglia and lincolnshire, actually some sunshine here, a dry day, the highest temperatures, too. and look how much warmer it's going to be across northern england and parts of scotland. the lower temperatures will actually be out towards the west and the south—west here where we will have extensive cloud, and the showers and that cloud lingers into sunday evening. let's have a look at bank holiday monday now. so through the night into monday, weather fronts across the uk, but we are fairly close to high pressure out towards the south—west here. so a pretty decent day. we could have some showers in the south—east on bank holiday monday. also notice that the wind arrows, air is coming in from the north across the far north of scotland. so really chilly in lerwick, six degrees, around eight degrees in stornoway, but in glasgow it's 15, in the midlands around 16 degrees celsius. so all in all, not a bad

bank holiday monday on the way. and then midweek, high pressure is close by and that basically means settled dry weather and that's reflected in the outlook. you can see wednesday and thursday there, sunny skies for cardiff and also for london. that's it for me. have a great sunday.

this hello, good morning. welcome to breakfast. nhs bosses won a significant disruption with the latest round of strikes by nurses in england starting at eight o'clock tonight. the final uk evacuation flight leaves sudan overnight as fighting intensifies in khartoum. and prepare to swear allegiance to the king. the public is invited to join a chorus of millions during next weekend's coronation. in sport, record break for the women who sealed the six nations grand

slam.