On November 11, girl group Billlie held their first XR (extended reality) concert, called the interlude of 11. During the performance, the members of Billlie guided the audience through their world through both real and XR performances that transcended reality, dreams and unconsciousness. What follows is a summary of the group’s fictional universe as they’ve built it so far and as seen through the lens of their spectacular one-year anniversary concert.

The day the purple rain came pouring down

The name Billlie represents “the B-side to our personalities that everyone has and can relate to,” while the fictional world they’ve created revolves around the goings-on in a village shrouded in mystery. The story revolves around a missing girl, Billlie Love, and a scary story that foretells “a big, black beast that comes to kidnap people and take them away” when a “bell rings 11 times and purple rain pours down in the daytime.” The members play characters who are inextricably intertwined with the missing girl’s story, but they all seem to avoid talking about the incident or tell lies about it.

The first-anniversary XR concert extends the storyline already established through Billlie’s music videos using extended reality technology to create the house where the missing girl lived and puts the group members inside the attic where they had gone to meet Billlie Love. The attic is fairytale-like but also somewhere the girl and the members clearly have memories of playing together, and this multilayered atmosphere of nostalgic childhood memories is created entirely in extended reality. The set is decorated with fully modeled props symbolizing each member, while geometric shapes appear here and there to explicitly convey the mystery and spirit of the idol group. AMBERIN, the company that was tasked with planning and producing the concert, said “it would be best to leave the meaning up to fans’ imaginations,” adding that they hope people “will enjoy the fun of finding and discovering” the meaning.

The music and stage direction reflect the group’s fictional universe as well. The lead single “RING X RING” off their debut album, the Billage of perception: chapter one, is full of lyrics about finding the missing girl, including, “They say there’s no trace / Is she dead dead,” and, “You just wait there / I’ll be there to rescue you.” Just like in “flipp!ng a coin,” the members enter the upside-down stage of their XR concert through a door rotated 180 degrees, moving from reality to the unconscious.

Their second mini album, the collective soul and unconscious: chapter one, introduces a multiverse angle to the lost girl narrative where the Billlie of the real world and the Billlie of another world speak directly to one another. “GingaMingaYo,” the album’s lead single, expresses confusion over whether the group itself is actually Billlie Love, with lines like, “found Billlie and it seems like it’s me,” and, “Who’s this Billlie in the mirror?” The track “overlap (1/1)” features lyrics like, “Your address, Eleven, b-side,” and, “I’m sure the door exists,” which seem to be Billlie talking to a Billlie in another world and clues toward answering the questions that underpin the mysteries of the group’s fictional universe. To explore that idea of the door and the unconscious world that lies beyond visually, the album cover for the collective soul and unconscious was reconstructed on stage as if the real and unconscious worlds coexist. The door is important in the group’s narrative as it allows passage between the real and unconscious worlds, meaning that to open the door is for a new world to unfold before their very eyes. The song they perform to close the concert, “the eleventh day,” features an open door that was previously closed, and now the audience can see the universe behind it. “Even though the concert’s over, we wanted to show the audience that there are still many stories left in the Billlie universe to tell,” HYBE JAPAN producers Kim Hee Na and Baekhee Kim, who handled the particulars that went into directing the concert, said. With the final song over, Billlie walking off stage and the once-closed door now open, a new world is in sight. Perhaps the group’s next album will shed more light on what this all means.

XR concerts: Making something that doesn’t exist

The interlude of 11 was held online as an extended reality concert, blurring the lines between virtual and reality. Whereas VR (virtual reality) blocks the real world out completely to give you a whole new world, and AR (augmented reality) adds computer graphics into the real world, XR uses both AR and VR to allow any augmentation of the real world that can be dreamed up. Both XR and Billlie’s narrative of the real world and the world of dreams and the unconscious break down the traditionally held boundary between virtual and reality. “There’s a limit to how much of Billlie’s universe—the way it constantly crosses the line between a mysterious reality and the unconscious—can be portrayed on a real stage,” Kim Gyeongwon, head of AMBERIN’s production team, said. “But on an XR stage, we’re free to use the space however we choose, so we thought it was the best way to express the group’s narrative.” The members of Billlie move freely between the real set and the virtual studio according to the themes of each song and put on a variety of different performances. Extended reality can change the scene in just seconds and allow anything to appear or disappear on stage suddenly at will, making the impossible possible and allowing fans to experience Billlie’s multiverse without the constraints of time or space, only the limits of imagination.

“We split it up by showing the real world on the real stage and the unconscious world of dreams in XR,” So Jaewoo, director of AMBERIN’s production team, said. The opening song takes place on a typical stage and the concert switches to XR between the third and fourth songs, “flipp!ng a coin” and “M◐◑N palace.” The changeover gives the feeling of watching a movie. The Billlie members notice a door that appears at the back of the real-life stage. Sua knocks on it, then Haruna opens it up and waves to the others to walk through. The world they enter through the door is an upside down XR world flipped 180 degrees from their own. It’s here in this strange new world that Billlie performs “M◐◑N palace.” The production team described the transition from “flipp!ng a coin” to the unconscious world as one of opening up a door to an upside-down dream palace. According to Yu Yena, head of MYSTIC STORY’s Business 2 team that handles production and directing, the song was selected to emphasize this turning point because “‘flipp!ng a coin’ was the best song to show a dramatic change in the world around them, as the title suggests.” Similarly, art team lead Han Jihee said that the “biggest task was building the unconscious world of the M◐◑N palace without any real-world references.” In other words, the XR portion of the concert meant designing things with no real-world equivalent and that could never possibly exist. “We studied the limitations of the space the artist would be performing in as well as the props they would have access to and from there designed the M◐◑N palace to be a mysterious fictional place with gravity working in more than one direction.”

Concert planning, production and direction were handled by AMBERIN, an art and technology company specializing in content for music designed using new technologies like VR, AR and XR. The XR concert was in pre-production for six months and made use of real-time graphics in the Unreal Engine to create an endless stage displayed on an extremely large curved LED screen. The production team’s Kim and So said they “spent a long time gathering ideas, looking into them and doing research to figure out how best to convey Billlie’s narrative with XR technology.” Other than directions for the camera and the overall mood, other specifics for acting were left up to the members of Billlie to decide. “The Billlie members worked closely and sincerely with each other to work out the details of their act together” and “took their roles seriously and acted naturally even in that unfamiliar XR environment,” amazing a rather grateful Han, who made the pre-recorded videos for the concert. “There’s a line at the end of the prerecorded video: ‘Making something that doesn’t exist, we call it desperate.’ I think ‘making something that doesn’t exist’ is exactly what XR technology did for the concert.” Out of a desperate, earnest study of Billlie’s world and the fans who call themselves Belllie’ve who were invited to join, they now have yet another new world to themselves. The door to Billlie’s world is now open.

Happy first anniversary, Billlie!

Siyoon: It meant a lot to me that we could invite Belllie’ve to our world and be there together! The XR performance gave a more detailed look at our fictional universe and I think that helped us feel more immersed in our performances, plus I think Belllie’ve really liked watching it. For this reason and many more, I think our first concert was really special and meant a lot!

Suhyeon: I want to start off by thanking everyone who celebrated our first anniversary together. We only made it to where we are today because Belllie’ve has been with us every step along the way. I hope you’re always with us and keep supporting us into the future! Billlanghae!

Tsuki: A lot of Belllie’ve said they were really happy they could celebrate our first anniversary with us and that made me feel so honored and made all the memories of the past year with Billlie come flooding back. I hope we have a lot of good things in our future. Belllie’ve always makes us happy, and we’ll work to always make them happy, too!

Sheon: We put on our XR concert set in the fictional Billlie universe to mark our first anniversary. It meant a lot to spend that time with Belllie’ve and it was fun showing off our world in different ways during the concert. We’re going to keep making good music and a variety of stories, too. I hope you’ll stick with us for life, Belllie’ve!

Haram: It was amazing being able to hold a concert in a space uniquely made for Billlie and Belllie’ve thanks to XR and I think that also made our fans’ love for us all the more touching.

Moon Sua: I was already excited and nervous about our first anniversary and doing this concert we were looking so forward to in XR made it even more exciting. It was already special because it’s for our first anniversary, but I think it’ll be remembered as an even more special concert because it was held in XR!

Haruna: This concert was about Belllie’ve celebrating Billlie’s first anniversary with us and we did it in an XR space made just for the two of us, so I hope it makes for a good memory for them.