An interactive stadium experience merging music, fashion, and virtual presence

Muse: Enter The Simulation was Stageverse's first major brand partnership — a fully interactive virtual concert experience launched in September 2021, available on Oculus Quest, iOS, and Android. Built around Muse's 2019 Simulation Theory tour at Madrid's Wanda Metropolitano Stadium, the experience placed fans inside a purpose-built virtual venue as customizable avatars, able to watch the show from 16 different viewpoints in 6K 360-degree footage, move freely through the space, emote, and attend together with friends in real time. The project brought together Muse, Stageverse, and luxury fashion house Balmain Paris in a collaboration that covered spatial design, avatar creation, virtual fashion, and live event experience. Covered by Variety, NME, and UploadVR.

A world built around the band

The Muse landing area was designed as a fully immersive branded environment — a space fans could explore for free regardless of whether they attended the concert. The space was stocked with Muse merchandise and memorabilia, interactive arcade machines, virtual T-shirt merch, and iconic props from the Simulation Theory music video including a giant robot head and a Lamborghini. Spatial UX design — a term I coined to describe the discipline of designing user flow through three-dimensional social environments — was applied throughout to ensure intuitive navigation, with animated billboards announcing upcoming shows. Beyond the venue, a full city environment was designed to give a sense of expansive scale and hint at the broader Stageverse world.

16 viewpoints, shared presence, and a seamless blend of real and virtual

The concert experience merged 6K 360-degree footage from the Wanda Metropolitano with real-time virtual avatars, requiring careful attention to the boundary between captured and rendered content. Users could choose from 16 camera viewpoints and move between them freely, watching the show together as embodied avatars — interacting, emoting, and moving around the space in real time. A key spatial design challenge was giving users a sense of shared physical presence while watching 360 video, which by nature envelops the entire field of view. The solution was a virtual floor that appeared when users moved through the space but faded away when stationary — creating a sense of grounded, shared environment without breaking immersion during the performance.

Virtual garments built to Balmain's exacting standards

Muse frontman Matt Bellamy is known for wearing Balmain on stage — making a collaboration between the fashion house and the virtual experience a natural fit. Balmain Paris provided reference materials as we developed the avatars and virtual garments, with their creative team reviewing and approving each piece against their standards for materiality, finish, and brand fidelity. Getting a major fashion house to sign off on real-time rendered virtual clothing — meeting their expectations at interactive frame rates rather than offline render quality — was a significant technical and creative achievement. The resulting avatars were markedly more detailed and expressive than anything comparable at the time. The NPC characters drawn from the Simulation Theory tour were developed alongside to populate the world with characters native to Muse's visual universe.

Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing on the collaboration: "My Balmain team and I are determined to always break down boundaries, as we search for new and compelling manners to communicate with an ever-expanding audience. Working with Muse and Stageverse is helping us to do just that." — Variety

A city beyond the stadium

The Muse experience extended beyond the concert venue into a surrounding city environment, designed to give the world a sense of scale and permanence — and to hint at the broader Stageverse platform taking shape around it. The experience launched across Oculus Quest, iOS, and Android, with the platform strategy designed to make the experience as widely accessible as possible from its first public release.