A2O Unveils 4DGS and AI Avatars as Lee Soo-man Returns to K-POP

Lee Soo-man, now in his 70s, is still looking at what comes next for K-POP. During the roughly three years he spent away from the Korean music industry, the key producer and visionary leader of A2O Entertainment has been quietly investing in a technology called 4DGS, or four-dimensional Gaussian splatting. The technology is a next-generation system that allows a momnet in time and space to be recreated, so a fan can watch an artist from any angle they choose, as if they were standing in the ame space.

Lee introduced 4DGS himself on Oct. 12, when he took the stage at the debut showcase for A2O's new rookie artists at KINTEX Hall 2 in Ilsan. "4DGS is not a technology that captures a single scene," he said. "It records the time and space the artist exists in."

4DGS has drawn growing interest in the video industry over the past year. It builds on 3DGS, or three-dimensional Gaussian splatting, which records a space in three dimensions. 4DGS adds the element of time. If 3DGS is a "spatial photograph" of a frozen space, 4DGS is a "spatial video" that also captures how people and objects move and change over time. To develop the technology and optimize it for XR devices, Lee has partnered with the U.S.-based firm 4DV Intelligence and Samsung Electronics.

At the showcase, this reporter put on an XR headset in a demo area set up outside the venue. The demo featured a segment from the film "The Pigeon Ring," which was made using 4DV Intelligence's technology and won the Grand Prize at the Venice International Film Festival (Biennale Cinema 2026) last month. The experience was immersive without feeling disorienting. There was no dizziness or feeling of being pulled out of the scene.

Once the technology is commercially available, viewers will be able to step outside the frame set by a director. They can walk through a space on their own and watch the content from a personal point of view that was never scripted. The demo made that clear. While watching a short film, I walked closer to an older man reading a book on a sofa, moved to the position from which he was looking to meet the character's gaze, and leaned in to see what he was reading.

Lee, a living figure in K-POP history, is betting on 4DGS because he expects the market for the technology to grow quickly. In the K-POP industry, content is already shifting toward more personalized experiences, from private messaging services that connect artists and fans to VR concerts.

4DGS takes this trend toward personalization a step further. It goes beyond the limits of 2D video, where fans could only see an artist from the angle a camera happened to capture. It also gives creators more freedom, since camera angles can be changed during post-production, even after a 2D video has been filmed.

The showcase also included a 4DGS video of performances by A2O's new rookie groups, A2O SOUL and A2O LITE. According to a company representative, the video was made by having the performers in a studio surrounded by 80 cameras, which recorded their movements from multiple angles. That footage is then fed to an AI system, and 4DV's own algorithm recreates the time and space within a virtual environment.

Unlike a 3D mesh, which represents a shape using points, lines, and surfaces, 4DGS uses tiny translucent particles called "Gaussians" that are grouped together like molecules to form the image. The result lmore closely resembles real life and creates a more natural viewing experience. The method is especially effective at capturing complex surface textures and the way light shifts across them.

The showcase also demonstrated an "AI avatar" technology that copies an artist's appearance, voice, and speaking style. The program is designed to let a fan and an artist's AI avatar hold a one-on-one video call in real time. The culture technology, or CT, that Lee has long championed is now taking shape through two main avenues: 4DGS and AI avatars.

In the future, Lee suggests, people may be able to revisit a specific moment from the past and speak directly with an AI avatar modeled on someone they miss. For now, 4DGS and AI avatars are separate tools, but the two could eventually be integrated into a single piece of content. When combined in K-POP, the technologies could give fans the feeling of a genuine one-on-one with an artist: entering the time and place of their choice, making eye contact with the artist, and engaging in a real-time conversation.

The two technologies Lee is pushing are not limited to the K-POP fandom business. As they advance, they could change the way people revisit the past and process their emotions. Before photos and video, people preserved moments from the past through drawings and memories. From the 20th century onward, flat 2D photos and videos have served as ways for people to hold on to moments they miss. In the near future, entire moments, time and space together, could be recorded and revisited at will.

If a past space can be fully recreated and paired with an AI avatar of someone who was once there, the technology could even help people cope with the weight of longing itself. The way people meet time and memory would start to shift.