The seat Seungjoon Lee sells does not exist. It is closer than front row, tidier than backstage and less socially perilous than materializing in a pop star's personal space. Put on a headset and the performer appears at conversational distance, captured in live-action 3D and planted inside a world assembled in a game engine. The artist can look straight at the camera. The fan receives the glance. For a few songs, architecture gives up.
This is the compact proposition behind AMAZE, the Los Angeles company Lee co-founded in 2015 and now leads as CEO. The compactness took work. Lee and his partners began with a much larger idea about what would follow the mobile era. They tried different kinds of virtual-reality content. They waited through a market that grew more slowly than they expected. They built cameras, software and production systems, then found a product that could be described without mentioning any of them: your favorite artist, impossibly near.
Act IThe screen after the screen
Lee arrived at this problem by changing professional dialects. He had worked as a software developer and attempted a startup with friends. From 2011 to 2012, he was an associate consultant at Bain & Company. Then came Kakao, where he led strategy and a new online-to-offline business from 2012 to 2015. The Korean mobile platform was a vivid lesson in what happens when a new interface reorganizes daily life.
At Kakao he met the three people who would become his co-founders: JB Lee, Jeremy Nam and Steven Koo. The four wanted another attempt at global scale. They left Korea for Silicon Valley and placed their bet on space. Personalized screens, they believed, would move closer to the viewer. A headset would stop being a little television strapped to the face and become a place.
Founding stories often acquire a false straight line in the retelling. This one kept its bends. AMAZE did not begin as a concert specialist. The team explored films and other formats, searching for the thing that gained rather than merely survived when moved into VR. Music supplied an answer because a performance contains an unusually sensitive unit of value: distance. At a stadium show, money can move you forward only so far. A stereoscopic camera can stand where a ticket holder cannot.
“Even in the AI era, I think what matters is an irreplaceable experience.”Seungjoon Lee, 2026
The choice sounds obvious only after the experiments. A story can be watched on a flat screen without losing its entire grammar. A concert is already a negotiation between presence and obstruction: the crowd, the lights, the tiny figure onstage, the giant screen offered as an apology. VR could change the negotiation. AMAZE narrowed its focus.
Act IITeach the machinery to vanish
The machinery did not vanish quickly. AMAZE developed high-resolution stereoscopic capture and a visual-effects pipeline built around Unreal Engine. Performers were recorded as live action, then placed in digital environments designed for their music. Lee describes two technical pillars: game-engine graphics and AI. The AI work is practical rather than ornamental, improving image quality, assisting postproduction and helping the team build interactive elements around the footage.
The production curve tells the story. Lee said a concert once required five or six months to make. By late 2023, after the team had completed eight or nine productions, a project could take about six to eight weeks. Experience codified choices. Automation absorbed repetitive work. The magic trick became less laborious without becoming less specific to the artist.
Time spent building one VR concert
Approximate comparison based on Lee's public description of the production cycle.For aespa's LYNK-POP production, proximity became an explicit directing choice. The performers worked close to the cameras because K-pop fans prize close-up views of their favorite artists. The resulting show ran about 25 to 30 minutes. Lee was matter-of-fact about the limit: current headsets are still demanding to wear for an hour. Future editions might add five or ten minutes, not an entire extra act, until the hardware improves.
It is a useful restraint. Immersive entertainment is prone to speaking in infinities. The product still meets a person with a schedule, a neck and a finite appetite for spectacle. AMAZE designs the fantasy around those facts. Technology becomes credible when somebody is willing to stop the show on time.
Act IIIThe cinema is the clever bit
The obvious obstacle to a VR concert platform is that most fans do not own the required hardware. AMAZE answered with a move of pleasing practicality: bring the headsets to a building already designed around tickets, showtimes and collective anticipation. In 2022, Megan Thee Stallion's Enter Thee Hottieverse toured AMC theaters in 15 American cities. Guests received Meta Quest 2 devices, nicknamed “Hottie Mounted Displays,” and entered a personalized performance after a short game-like introduction.
The arrangement joins two apparently opposing experiences. Each viewer occupies a private visual world, yet cheers and singalongs can still break out across the physical auditorium. Nobody needs to explain what a movie theater is for. AMAZE changes what appears after the lights go down.
When a new interface is scarce, distribute the experience through an old ritual. The cinema gives VR a familiar purchase, place and time - and lets the product teach the audience why an at-home library might matter later.
That bridge carried AMAZE toward K-pop. In 2022 the company formed Studio A with SM Entertainment. Its projects expanded from aespa to artists and groups including Kai, ENHYPEN, TOMORROW X TOGETHER, ATEEZ and TWS. HYPERFOCUS, the TOMORROW X TOGETHER VR concert, traveled across Asia, North America, Europe and Mexico from 2024 into 2025. A format born from a global thesis found a particularly fluent partner in a music culture already organized around international fandom.
Four former Kakao colleagues found AmazeVR and begin exploring spatial media.
An Unreal Engine production foundation built with Roc Nation sharpens the move toward music.
Megan Thee Stallion reaches cinemas; Studio A launches with SM Entertainment; $17 million in new Series B capital is announced.
The concert app launches across VR platforms and arrives as an Apple Vision Pro day-one app.
Theatrical K-pop tours spread internationally while Lee frames the next chapter around “irreplaceable” spatial experiences.
Act IVA platform hiding inside a ticket
Lee's ambition has widened again, though it is now anchored to a proven use. He has described the goal as a Spotify for VR music: a global platform where fans can choose among immersive performances and artists can create work for the format. In 2025 he said overseas audiences accounted for about 90 percent of the company's VR concert sales. The figure makes the platform thesis easier to see. A recorded spatial performance can travel without moving the performer or asking every fan to win a ticket lottery.
Accessibility here has a precise meaning. A VR show is not a replacement for sharing air with an artist and thousands of strangers. It offers a different asset: repeatable closeness. Lee, an avid concertgoer by his own account, understands the old problem. The closer seats are scarce, costly and still separated from the stage. The virtual seat cheats geometry instead of auctioning it.
There is personality in the artists Lee mentions. In 2023 he volunteered that he would like to make a VR concert with Jungkook of BTS because he loved the songs and admired the performance. The remark is refreshingly specific. Platform strategy may operate in catalogs and territories; a concert still begins because somebody wants to watch a particular person sing.
The company around that desire has accumulated institutional proof. Its Megan Thee Stallion production earned a Webby nomination and three platinum Vega Digital Awards. Fast Company included AMAZE in its 2023 live-events list and ranked it among its augmented and virtual reality selections in 2024. Financing followed: a $15 million bridge round announced in early 2022, then $17 million in new Series B investment that September, alongside the partnership with SM Entertainment.
Lee's own public comments keep returning to the team. In a Korean recruiting post, he wrote that good people are everything and that building a good team mattered more than anything else. This is less decorative than it sounds. AMAZE sits across awkward borders - Seoul and Los Angeles, software and stagecraft, music labels and cinemas, camera engineering and fan behavior. Translation is the daily operation.
FinaleThe useful size of a big idea
Ten years after the company began, Lee's original conviction about spatial media remains visible. What changed is its useful size. “The future after mobile” is a thesis. A singer looking directly at one fan is a product. A headset in every home is a forecast. A headset waiting at a cinema seat is an operation.
AMAZE now talks beyond music again. Lee believes spatial experience will develop its own grammar and spread to other kinds of content, provided it offers something ordinary 2D media cannot. That condition matters. The world has no shortage of rectangles asking to be watched. A new medium earns attention by delivering a memory unavailable on the old one.
For Lee, the memory should not be “I saw an impressive VR demo.” It should be closer to “the artist was right there.” The distinction is the entire decade: four colleagues leaving Kakao, a move across the Pacific, formats discarded, production months compressed, headsets packed into theaters, fans singing in the dark. The technology worked hardest so the distance could disappear.