Yakushima Treasure rebuilds a concert as 3D-scanned space you can fly through like a soul

Yakushima Treasure, KOM_I and OORUTAICHI's island music project, had planned a live performance in Yakushima's banyan forest; COVID made live concerts impossible, so they asked Dentsu Craft Tokyo whether technology could make a new kind of live experience instead.

Don't stream the stage — capture the whole forest as LiDAR point clouds, photogrammetry and volumetric video, and let each viewer take viewpoints a human body can't have

One take, no cuts: the whole forest was 360° LiDAR-scanned, colors rebuilt from over 1,500 photographs via photogrammetry, the artists captured by nine depth cameras, audio recorded with 360° microphones into an eight-speaker surround field — then all of it reconstructed in a browser experience where the camera can float, pass through bodies and fly around the scene.

Won a Bronze Lion in Digital Craft at Cannes Lions 2021 and the Digital Craft Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2022, giving the music industry a working 'new live' format during COVID.

Yakushima Treasure is KOM_I (Wednesday Campanella) and OORUTAICHI's project of songs built from the island's sounds — frog heartbeats, rain drumming on trees, waves around a quay. When 2020's pandemic made the planned live in Yakushima's banyan forest impossible, the team turned to Dentsu Craft Tokyo with an unusual brief: not 'how do we stream the concert', but whether technology could create a genuinely new way to experience a live performance.

Their first two decisions were refusals. The project would not aim to be a substitute for a real concert, and it would not chase technology for its own sake. Instead the goal became an experience no human body could ever have: to watch a one-take performance from the viewpoint of a soul. Four capture methods were chosen to match that goal — LiDAR for the whole forest as 3D point-cloud space, photogrammetry from over 1,500 photos for color, nine depth cameras for volumetric video of the artists, and 360° microphones feeding an eight-speaker surround sound field.

Out of that came 'ANOTHER LIVE', an interactive browser experience in which viewers move freely inside the scanned forest — above, below, sideways, so close to the artists that the distance disappears, even passing through them. WebGL layers in other viewers' synthesized perspectives so the space feels inhabited. Rather than fight the roughness of scanned point clouds, the style made it meaning: a 'soul's-eye world' matching the songs' motif of Okinawan soul-sending rituals.

Launched first as paid online streaming (February 11 – March 31, 2021), it became free from July 1, 2021 after winning a Digital Craft Bronze at Cannes Lions, and took the Digital Craft Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2022. It remains a reference point for the 'new live' format — neither a filmed concert nor a music video, but the first concert that lets the audience choose where to stand after the concert is over.

Capturing the space instead of the stage gives online audiences what a real venue cannot: viewpoints with no physical constraints — a different, additive experience, not a lesser copy.

Defining the experience first let the team pick one capture method per element — space, texture, bodies, sound — instead of forcing a single camera system to do everything.

Treating the one-take performance as ritual turned the scan's technical roughness into a poetic style, so constraints became meaning rather than defects to hide.

If you can't replicate the old experience, invent a different one: decide which viewpoint your format can own that the original never could, then let that decision pick the technology

The Cannes Bronze made the work free to watch from July 1, 2021 and capped a run that ended in the Digital Craft Grand Prix at Spikes Asia 2022. For Dentsu Craft Tokyo the project became a showcase of its 'Human Magic' production model — creators from different companies co-working on idea, engineering and craft — and a reference point in the industry's post-pandemic search for a 'new live' format that is neither a filmed concert nor a music video.