Setting the Bar For Virtual Reality Events
What I learned producing the Ready Player Golf Award Show in VR
This year I attended hundreds of online and virtual events of all sorts and kinds, I organized and helped to broadcast tens of them on various platforms for different partners and clients. I keep exploring this space together with a great community of experts at #ZeroEvent and #XRCrowd as new platforms and players keep mushrooming. The recent $125M investment in HOPIN (a virtual conference platform like Zoom but with a better interface for hosting events) at a staggering $2 billion valuation for a company that had just 6 employees pre-COVID is just one of the latest signs that the hype in the online events is peaking. The key difference between any Zoom event and a shared social experience in a virtual space is that you and your colleagues or friends can DO something together, not just look at each other over the screen. Zoom is about talking and exchanging verbal information. In VR and other 3D shared spaces, it’s not so much just about talking, but rather DOING something together. Exploring, playing, building, drawing — interacting through your avatar. Cheering or shaking virtual hands — the amount of non-verbal communication adds so much to the experience. It’s been fun to see how quickly the industry is evolving from being excited about just an ability to gather 50 people in one room in VR to building best practices around what virtual event should be like.
Starting day one of a lockdown, Richard Ward, the head of VR/AR Enterprise at McKinsey, was one of the visionaries in the space. He was very outspoken about what virtual events are suitable for and where Zoom works better. As I am a big fan of Richard’s vision for virtual events, I was excited when he invited me to work with him on his latest project — a VR golf tournament — and to run production for an award show in ENGAGE.
The key to the event’s success was definitely Richard’s sharp, clear vision of what he wanted to achieve. In this short clip, Richard summarizes what were the goals and the achieved results.
Ready Player Golf became such a milestone in virtual events for me that I’d like to share key takeaways and a unique production pipeline that we used to produce this event in just six weeks.
Ready Player Golf — Deep Dive
Ready Player Golf was a unique experiment in combining different platforms and workflows to create an outstanding virtual event, and to provide a valuable networking experience to all the participants who paid for the ticket. Over 50 participants from different parts of the world donated over $12300 for charity Doctors Without Borders. We, as a team, received invaluable production experience — and new ideas for future projects.
The Virtual Golf contest happened in the ProPutt app that is available on Oculus Quest. But as ProPutt lacked the social aspect of people gathering together as a group, Richard decided to have an award ceremony in the ENGAGE platform by Immersive VR Education that kindly agreed to support the cause and host the event. Both me and Richard were quite familiar with the platform as it’s one of the best solutions on the market to gather people and show content. But ENGAGE is a closed system — you can use IFX from their extensive library, but you cannot create or upload your own IFX unless you’re an enterprise client working directly with the ENGAGE team.
That’s when Richard introduced me to the team at Tvori and explained his vision to create “as Circle Du Solei as possible” experience.
Richard Ward: “The thing that we really wanted to do is to bring people together in a way so that they shared experience that only VR can do, and thus we put together this award show where there were things happening to the left, to the right, up, down. This shared experience was something people could talk about and remember as a real thing, because of the way people remember things”.
But how do you create a custom animation for the event from scratch in just 4–6 weeks and also import it back to the ENGAGE in time for the event? How can you sketch, approve, make adjustments, and have a review process when the whole team is spread all across the world in the US, Ireland, and Russia?
Working with the Tvori team proved that it’s totally possible. With their new addition to the product line called Tvori Viewer, we were able to change the production process completely.
The ENGAGE team exported an FBX of their location that we decided to use for the award show. Inside this location, the Tvori team started to bring Richard’s ideas to life using their in-VR animation tools native to the medium.
After the animation sketches were done, they exported it to Tvori Viewer — and within minutes, we were able to gather as a group inside Tvori Viewer and review the scenes. It was essential that we could see it from different perspectives and different tables, make comments, and suggest edits. We were able to see what works — and what doesn’t. As a result, in a matter of weeks, the Tvori team created seven original animations. We went through various iterations of each idea to make sure it really works in VR and in the specific space we chose as our 3D world.
The experience is incomplete if you have an image without the sound. It’s true for any medium, and it’s so true for VR. Only when we added all the sound effects to the animation sequences, they really started to shine. After combining sound design with final IFX, the Tvori team exported the final FBX — and with the support of the ENGAGE team on the final stage, we saw it embedded in their platform. After quick adjustments and additional push through the ENGAGE internal pipeline, we enjoyed all seven scenes that were previously created in Tvori and previewed in Tvori Viewer.
Key Takeaways
My experience of working on this project reiterated several essential points for virtual events:
- If you put together a VR event, use VR as a medium. Don’t replicate something that can be done over Zoom. Bring value to the audience to justify why they need to make an extra effort to be in VR for your event. Either it’s a social aspect or a unique show that you’ve put together — justify. Avoid creating passive watching experiences that don’t have a unique VR-only aspect to it. In other words, if you don’t have “green dinosaurs” in the room, why bother to put on a VR headset?
- Always search for solutions native to the medium. I was amazed at how quickly animation sequences can be done in Tvori and how well the Tvori-ENGAGE workflow worked.
- The ability to preview the results in a 3D space is invaluable. Just as we go through a client review process working on a 2D design, having an ability to jump for a 30 min meeting in a 3D space, see the scaling, the positioning in a specific 3D environment is essential. Just imagining doing that without any ability to preview it inside a VR headset and just having a 3D model on a flat-screen would be completely useless.
- Sound brings life and completes every experience, don’t underestimate it and invest in a good sound design. It’s going to make the experience richer for your audience.
- Obviously, don’t forget to make a good 2D show out of your VR event. It’s important to create a truly outstanding experience for your in-VR attending audience, but it’s also crucial to share with larger audiences what you’ve created. That way more people can be inspired to put on a headset and join you as attendees in VR next time. Do livestream, do quality broadcast, do promo videos.
Full Award Show inside ENGAGE:
Ready Player Golf Promo:
Credits:
Founder, the main driving force behind the project — Richard Ward
Ready Player Golf project team leads: Sophia Moshasha and Ben Erwin
VR Golf Tournament in ProPutt https://www.proputt.com/
VR Award Ceremony in ENGAGE VR by Immersive VR Education https://engagevr.io/
Award Ceremony Production & 2D Broadcast: Alina Mikhaleva & Less Media Group
Animation created by Tvori team https://tvori.co/, led by Inga Petrayevskaya and Viktor Komarovskih.
For more information go to https://www.readyplayergolf.com/ or contact info@readyplayergolf.com
