Fatboy Slim: Eat Sleep VR Repeat: the gig that lets you take to the skies (in your own basement)

Last night a DJ risked my life. I went to a Fatboy Slim concert, and while the superstar dance producer mixed his records, I danced on the shoulders of a gorilla, rode on the back of a giant cockroach, raced through a desert on the hood of a driverless car and plummeted thousands of feet through the air with a choreographed skydiving dance troupe. It all ended with Greta Thunberg predicting climate apocalypse white DJ Norman Cook set off a nuclear bomb. And no, I wasn’t on drugs.

I was, in fact, attending Eat Sleep VR Repeat, a 45-minute immersive virtual reality experience staged by Engage, a multi-user platform in the Metaverse (I do realise that sentence reads like the kind of pulp science fiction nonsense I grew up reading as a kid). Essentially, I strapped into an Oculus Quest 2 headset – which you will need to own or have access to already – and attended a concert in the form of an avatar projected in a 360-degree immersive interactive environment (is that any more convincing?).

If you had actually witnessed this, you would have found me dancing like a fool in my basement with a giant set of white plastic goggles obscuring my vision, throwing my best moves in a two-metre circle marked out between my fridge, washing machine and the downstairs sink. When I raised my hands in the air like I just didn’t care, I banged my knuckles on the ceiling. I know I was making a complete idiot of myself because at one point in the Fatboy Slim DJ mix I distinctly heard the sound of my wife giggling uncontrollably, having innocently descended to try and do some laundry.

Virtual concerts are a thing. As developers seek to explore and exploit shared digital spaces, shows by musical avatars of Twenty One Pilots, Ariana Grande and David Guetta have been staged on online gaming platforms such as Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft and, of course, Mark Zuckerburg’s heavily touted Metaverse platform. Last year, Epic Games staged a performance by a skyscraper sized version of US rapper Travis Scott that attracted 12 million viewers.

They do clearly offer some advantages to the concert goer. One is that you don’t actually have to leave your house. Another is that you can always get an unobscured view from the best seat in the venue by simply projecting yourself as close to the performer as the game design will allow. At the press of a button, I could teleport from dancing under the nose of a giant Fatboy to the back of the set to gain a wider review of the psychedelic mayhem.