If you’re a K-Pop fan who owns a Meta Quest headset or gets one for Christmas, Meta has a gift for you; free front-row seats to a BlackPink concert in virtual reality taking place on December 26 at 5pm PT / Wednesday 1am GMT / Wednesday 12am ACT.
The recording is from the group’s finale show of its recent World Tour – performed at the Gocheok Sky Dome – and will be available inside Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse platform.
And this isn’t some 10-minute clip show, this is a full-on 70-minute performance that has been custom-made for VR according to a Meta press release. It’ll feature a number of the group’s most popular tracks including Shut Down, Pink Venom, and How You Like That and more.
Get in early to avoid disappointment
You can RSVP for the BlackPink concert on the event’s page but to watch it you’ll need a Quest headset – specifically an Oculus Quest 2, Meta Quest Pro, or Meta Quest 3 – and the latest version of Meta Horizon Worlds installed.
I’d recommend setting an alarm about 1 hour before the start time. This should give you time to install any updates if your app or headset isn’t up to date, get your avatar into the right outfit or created if you don’t yet have one, and go through the Horizon Worlds tutorial and into the Music Valley event space if you haven’t played it already.
From experience, I can tell you it’s better to wait for a while in the event than it is to try and hop in last minute and be stuck in long virtual queues that cause you to miss the concert.
Popular artists are known to cause server crashes when an influx of people try to load in all at the same time. Meta’s first big Foo Fighters VR concert suffered from this, and more recently Eminiem’s performance in Fortnite’s Big Bang event was missed by a lot of fans because of similar issues.
Thankfully if you do miss the BlackPink concert premiere because of server issues, simply can’t make it because of other commitments, or want to watch it again later, replays will be available until “the end of January” according to the official press release.