Are they for real? South Korean girl band Mave offers glimpse into metaverse

SEOUL – Less than two months ago, the first music video by South Korean girl quartet Mave went viral, racking up nearly 20 million views on YouTube and setting the stage for potential global success.

At first glance, Mave looks like any other idolised K-pop band – except that it exists only virtually.

Its four members – Siu, Zena, Tyra and Marty – live in the metaverse, and their songs, dances, interviews and even their hairstyles are created by web designers and artificial intelligence (AI).

“When I first saw Mave, it was a little confusing... whether they were humans or virtual characters,” said Ms Han Su-min, a 19-year-old living in Seoul.

“Because I use metaverse platforms with my friends often, I feel like I could become their fan.”

The group’s human-like avatars provide an early glimpse of

how the metaverse is likely to evolve

as South Korea’s entertainment and tech industries join hands in the fledgling technology.

It also represents a serious push by tech giant Kakao to become a dominant force in entertainment.

Apart from backing Mave, Kakao launched a 1.25 trillion won (S$1.3 billion) tender offer last week to buy South Korean K-pop pioneer SM Entertainment.

SM is home to popular K-pop groups such as Girls’ Generation, H.O.T., Exo, Red Velvet, Super Junior, Shinee, NCT Dream and Aespa.

Kakao declined to comment on how it would balance the demands of managing real and virtual bands.

The company’s bet on the metaverse bucks a global trend.

Big tech companies from Facebook parent Meta Platforms to China’s Tencent Holdings are now reining in their spending on virtual worlds to ride out the economic downturn.

Kakao said earlier that it had invested 12 billion won in Metaverse Entertainment, a subsidiary it formed with gaming firm Netmarble to create Mave.

But the company declined to make any income forecasts for the venture.

Mave is an “ongoing” project to explore new business opportunities and find ways to work around technological challenges, said Metaverse Entertainment head Chu Ji-yeon.

Four languages

The concept is not new in South Korea.

In 1998, virtual singer Adam was launched, and two decades later, K-pop girl group K/DA, inspired by characters from video game League Of Legends, also made a debut. Neither took off.

But South Korean technology has made much progress since then in creating virtual characters. The members of Mave are more natural-looking, thanks to new tools and AI that developers used to create the group members’ facial expressions and small details like streaks in their hair, viewers say.

With the aid of an AI voice generator, Mave’s members can speak four languages – Korean, English, French and Bahasa Indonesia. But they cannot speak in response to prompts and have to rely on scripts prepared by humans.

The group’s voices in the debut single Pandora, and the choreography in the music video, were created by human performers and processed by motion-capture and real-time 3D rendering technologies.

Experts say the Covid-19 pandemic aided the growth of such virtual characters, as many K-pop companies pivoted to online content to satiate homebound fans.

“Fans became more used to non face-to-face content and communication with their idol groups for nearly three years,” said Ms Lee Jong-im, a pop-culture critic who teaches at Seoul National University.

“It seems they have become more accepting of the concept that virtual and actual idol groups can integrate.”

While virtual groups like Mave are making headlines for their novelty, questions remain over whether they can match the interaction between conventional popular bands and their legions of fans.

“Virtual idols will move exactly as they are manufactured. And without any unpredictability, they will become something close to video technology, not K-pop,” said associate professor of cultural studies Lee Gyu-tag of George Mason University Korea.

Yet, Mave‘s creators and entertainment industry officials are upbeat about its potential.

“With so many comments received from all over the world, I’ve realised that viewers do want something new and that they are rather open-minded,” said Ms Roh Shi-yong, chief producer of a weekly music show on local TV station MBC that aired Mave’s performance twice.

“The metaverse era is coming.” REUTERS