Virtual pleasures

In the second installment of her K-pop series, Faye Bradley discovers how Hong Kong's tech wizards and metaverse architects are changing the ways in which K-pop is consumed.

Earlier this year, a four-member all-girl K-pop group claimed the spotlight. Launched by Metaverse Entertainment in January, Mave had racked up over 20 million views for its hit single Pandora in less than a month. At first glance, Mave comes across as a regular quartet of teenage performers. Only that its members are not human. The figures were created using machine learning, deep fake and real-time 3D rendering technologies. Though they look almost real, a closer scrutiny reveals that the even skin tones and flawless figures of these virtual performers are too good to be true.

Mave is just one among a number of virtual K-pop groups to have emerged during the most restrictive phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eternity and its hit single I'm Real debuted in 2021. Launched in 2020, Aespa is a hybrid of the real and virtual. The band's human artists sometimes share the stage with their digital counterparts, hologrammed into the concert arena. Kakao Entertainment launched Feverse this past May. Thirty human contestants chosen from existing K-pop bands competed in a survival virtual reality show under the guise of their digital avatars for a place in the five-member virtual girl band.

South Korean virtual boy band Plave attracted over 250,000 YouTube subscribers soon after its debut in 2023. Behind each of the band's five animated 3D figures is a human artist, performing the vocals and dance movements, generated with the help of real-time motion capture technology.