Virtual Conferencing: From Theory to Practice
What I’ve learned about Virtual Conferencing as an organizer, speaker and participant.
It’s been over two months since SXSW was canceled, and we found ourselves in the new COVID reality. On March 18th, I published a piece entitled Going Virtual: Where Do We Start? And it was only the beginning when — led by the XRCrowd initiative — XR community started regular #ZeroEvent group-testings to see which platforms fit best for various virtual events. Now, less than two months later, I want to expand on this topic and share what I’ve learned from this crazy journey as an organizer, speaker, and participant of virtual events in the last two months.
XRBase Investor Event, Virtual Edition
Backstage of virtual event production: VR inside and out.
On April 22nd, a 4th XRBase Investor Event took place as part of the Laval Virtual World Conference, only this time it was an entirely virtual edition. Two weeks before that, we confirmed the plan to put together an Investor event in partnership and with support from HTC Vive X on Engage VR platform. I was lucky to be invited by Head of Industry analytics of XRBASE and Executive Producer of the event Andrey Lunev and Founder of XRBase Daan Kip to join the team as a co-producer and broadcast partner. My company, Less Media Group, was responsible for the visual production of the event, and the plan was ambitious. We wanted to have a virtual event with the premium selected audience inside VR - mostly investors and startups. At the same time, we wanted to connect with the audiences at the Laval Virtual World Conference that was held inside the Virbela platform, as well as translate the value of the event to 2D audiences through YouTube stream. We also didn’t want to JUST stream to YouTube. We wanted to treat visual stream from inside VR as we would treat a live TV event and apply the same production value, which means that we wanted to have a multi-camera stream, different viewpoints, slick edit, on-air titles and graphics, and all of that live from VR to both Virbela and YouTube.
The purpose of this experiment was to try and replicate a real-live investor event fully in VR and to keep the value that it brings to all the participants, including startups and investors. We divided the event into a public part that included on-stage pitches from eight selected startups, a panel discussion with VC’s and a Q&A, and a private in-VR part that included one-on-one meetings and an essential aspect of any investor event — business networking. Here is a short summary:
Almost three hours of broadcast-quality content streamed from inside VR to multiple platforms simultaneously. It included pre-recorded and edited startup pitches and expert panel discussion as well as live Q&A and interviews that were broadcasted as a multi-camera livestream. Over 100 guests joined the event inside VR, and their experience was very different from those who just watched the 2D livestream. They were able to network & interact, and physically share the virtual space with other guests.
Key takeaway: if you are planning a production of a virtual event that you also want to translate to 2D audiences, prepare for it as two separate events, with different content strategies, outputs, and budget.
Inside VR: your VR audience might be smaller compared to the 2D stream, but they should have a premium experience. You have to think about every step of their user-journey: from pre-event communication with onboarding instructions and platform training to event stuff support available at the venue. The best experience for the in-VR audience is achieved when there is a shift from passive viewership to active participation. Passive viewership can be easily done through a flat livestream. VR is an effort, and this effort should be rewarded with a premium audience experience that cannot be replicated in other mediums. The critical component for positive audience feedback is active participation. Those who experienced the magic of having small conversations with industry peers from all around the world in one room just as we used to have IRL at any conference or event expressed overwhelmingly positive feedback. It’s the real human connection that creates value in VR.
Outside VR: there are not enough headsets available, and it’s the biggest obstacle for scaling virtual events right now. And though the real magic of VR can be experienced only inside the headset, I see 2D content created inside virtual environments as a significant trend that is coming. And it requires a professional skill set. If you want to broadcast your virtual event, make sure you show it in a way that next time people would want to join in VR. Make it look GOOD. If you create a bad quality broadcast from your virtual event, you actually do the industry a disservice. That’s why it is crucial to apply a broadcast-quality approach to the content created inside virtual worlds. We get visually bored if we are watching a static camera at the back of the room pointed at a stage. It’s low-quality content in real life. The same thing with virtual — hire professionals with TV experience to translate virtual into TV. Virtual cameraman, virtual editor, director of virtual livestream — all of these are legitimate jobs that already exist, at least within my company. A good cameraman will quickly adapt and translate his/her professional vision into a virtual environment - the same with a good TV editor. Make sure you bring in people with the vision, and they will create good broadcast-quality content. Think about visual packaging — a slick on-air graphic is necessary for a good edit to come together and for the final product to look professional. Think about dynamics and don’t make long boring segments — we’re very visually spoiled, and our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. Don’t produce bad TV out of a good VR event! It will not help bring more people into VR.
Un-virtualizing the team:
I think the best way to give a sense of how much work it is to produce a virtual event is to un-virtualize our fantastic team that worked on the XRBase Investor event and spent two crazy weeks (or even less) putting it all together.
Daan Kip and Andrey Lunev led the whole project, working with VC’s and startups. Ultimately 20+ investors and 100+ startups registered to join the event in virtual reality. On top of that 60+ industry experts were invited. Out of them at least 100+ unique visitors joined virtual rooms inside Engage platform and 1400+ views on YouTube livestream by May 10th.
Dave Haynes from HTC Vive X made it possible to turn this idea into a reality and provided invaluable support from Engage side.
Shea Elmore ensured that all of us stayed relatively sane and on schedule, overlooking the production coordination.
There was a team of editors, designers, copywriters, PR-support, and web-editors that were working part-time on the project. Everything that you do for a real physical event — from general design to PR and social media support — you do for a virtual event.
But on top of that, there was an amazing team that was working strategically to provide the best experience for in-VR audiences led by Andrey Lunev, Maud Clavier, Michael Barngrover, and the Diversion cinema team.
They made sure that there were instructions put in place on how to download and install Engage. They organized pre-event trainings in Engage and Zoom-support, and during the first hour of the event, they were bombarded with last-minute requests from people who didn’t do all the pre-installation beforehand. The Diversion team led by Camille Lopato and Marc Lopato did a fantastic job supporting all in-VR preparations — from setting up split-rooms and managing the audiences inside VR to making sure that every room had a trained host who ensured that audience members were muted and seated for the duration of the event, and that everything ran as smoothly as possible, while providing support to people at the venue.
On the broadcast side, I had a team of six people that worked on the content side: from getting all the holographic recordings in place to the production of 2D recorded and live content, including setting up a simultaneous livestream through OBS studio with CDN-provider support to ensure a stable signal to multiple platforms at once. We set up a broadcast studio with three powerful PCVR stations and collectively spent over 100 hours inside Engage VR.
Overall, a team of over 25 people was working around the clock to make this event a success.
Not to mention all the participants, VC’s and startups, who dedicated their time to join us on stage. And let me tell you that there are a lot of technical nuances that can be learned only in practice when you try to replicate a physical event in VR. A key lesson learned — schedule and plan to spend much more time in VR compared to the amount of output content that you are aiming to produce. The tech is still very experimental, so plan to troubleshoot a lot of technical issues.
First, you need to work with your speakers and give them time to get adjusted to the feel of the specific VR platform. We were lucky to work with the industry folks: they had their own hardware and were familiar with the technology. Still, it takes time to adjust and feel comfortable and relaxed, to forget about the tech and concentrate on communication. We recorded eight startup pitches with founders of selected startups. For 5-minute pitches, on average, we spent at least an hour recording from onboarding, instructions to a dry-run — and the actual pitch. You have to put work into your VR performance for it to look good, look natural, and translate your personality.
Soundcheck: obviously, voice is an essential part of your identity when everything else is virtual. And yet, problems with the sound are among the most common ones. Make sure you instruct people to wear headphones (not Bluetooth connected) if they use a standalone device like Oculus Quest. PCVR stations usually produce fewer audio problems, but still, we asked every speaker on the panel to mute themselves when they were not speaking as some mics still created echoes and caught outside noises from the environment. Every noise stays in the recording and is impossible to fix. The ability to record multiple audio feeds and save audio separately would be something that platforms should look into for sure.
Avatar body movements & hand gestures are fundamental. It is something only a VR medium can provide — the sense of virtual space — and taking advantage of the ability to move your body, turn your head naturally towards the speaker, shake hands or wave to your audience — all those small things turn your avatar into a real YOU in the viewers’ minds. Usually, it takes people a bit of time to get comfortable inside a VR headset and start acting more naturally.
Translating VR into flat
The Engage VR platform has a very important feature — the ability to record a scene holographically. This is unique in itself — you can record and replay a full 3D scene, and you can feel as if you’re reliving it, which makes us wonder about the future of entertainment. Would it be possible to record the Oscars Award Ceremony, for example, and an unlimited number of viewers will be able to replay it having a seat inside the Theater? Or would it be possible to replay a movie scene with you being inside? From an inside-VR perspective, it opens a new layer for the industry — participatory entertainment. And for now, while the majority of our consumers are still 2D, it also means that you can record your speakers once — and then replay the same scene as many times as you need and capture it in 2D from different viewpoints. For the XRBase Event, we captured every scene from 8 to 10 camera angles, meaning that for an hour of content, you spend at least 10-times more time capturing it in flat. But it also means that producing content inside VR is going to be incomparably cheaper compared to real life. Just imagine having ten different cameras in a physical space - it would be a vast and very costly production.
The fact that we had over 1.5 hours of pre-recorded content allowed us to play around with camera angles, with editing, and with on-air graphics and produce a sleek 2D video experience. And, of course, protected us from having any technical difficulties with live content that didn’t involve audience participation. But after the pre-recorded part, we switched to a live part that included Q&A between VC’s and startups and a live interview room with guests. As we experimented with the live for the first time, we had a two-camera setup and were switching in between the two during the stream. The more cameras you want to have — the more machines you have to have connected to your OBS studio. And, of course, during the live part, it’s even more important to have room moderators in place that can quickly mute audience members and seat them, so they don’t interrupt the livestream, and everything looks smooth.
It was an incredible experience to put together such an event, and I can say we had a lot of fun as well as a lot to learn from this event. We managed to achieve what we hoped for — get VC’s from Silicon Valley and Europe, and startups from Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Britain all in one room, though this room was virtual. The Engage VR platform opens a lot of opportunities for both content creation and conference organization. Though there is a steep learning curve and, and a lot of technical nuances, I’m excited about the opportunity to have more events on this platform in the future.
From Organizer to Speaker and Moderator
The XRBase investor event was part of a much bigger event, the Laval Virtual conference that took place on April 22st — 24th inside the VirBELA virtual world. And though a lot of people were skeptical about the VirBELA platform at first because it’s not fully VR and because of it’s silly graphics, I think it is evident for everyone who participated that it served its purpose, and the Laval team did an amazing job. In less than a month, they put together a virtual event that attracted over 11K registered participants from 110 countries and gathered over 6000 avatars in one virtual world - even if it’s not fully VR, it’s a fantastic achievement. And a courageous experiment for the whole industry.
I was moderating a track on Virtual Conferencing, and we both had very interesting presentations from the CEO of VirBELA Alex Howland and Blair Macintyre from Mozilla Hubs, as well as an engaging panel discussion with Thomas Bedenk from Exozet, Lorelle Van Fossen from Educators in VR and Andrey Lunev from XRCrowd.
To be honest, I enjoyed my participation in Laval way more than I expected. For me, both moderating and presenting was fun. And though it might not be possible to translate this experience into a beautiful 2D experience (Engage provides way richer possibilities for that for sure), and even though we experienced a lot of technical difficulties with sound and presentations, from a speaker and participant perspective, it made total sense to share one virtual space with other people. It was very convenient as well to have an ability to text chat with everyone in the room as well as with selected people privately. The best part of the whole event was virtual serendipity — after we were done with the panel discussion, all the speakers came “down” from the stage, and we had the best time chatting. Audience members joined us, and we had a completely random and fun conversation. It felt exactly like in real life, where we just finished the panel and inspired by the talk, continued chatting behind the scenes. That is something that would not be possible on any Zoom, and we all felt very “present” at that moment.
What worked
Networking. Having an ability to explore virtual environments together with other avatars. The ability to randomly join the conversation or start a new one with a person that just happened to be standing next to you. All those small personal interactions that we enjoy so much at a real event translated very well into virtual space.
Fun social experiences. The VR community flooded Twitter and LinkedIn with funny pictures from the Laval virtual beach or from a lighthouse. All the informal places to gather and network, and activities outside of traditional conference halls provided a lot of value for everyone who spent these three days inside the Laval World. It was fun, and it was worth it.
What didn’t work
Large crowds of people. It is impossible to have a quality interaction with 500 people simultaneously in real life; in VR, it makes even less sense. Looking into other avatars from the back while trying to understand what is happening on the stage is not the best experience. Anything that requires you to sit and observe passively is done better in 2D. That’s why 2D content produced from inside virtual worlds is so important. Anything that involves your active participation is way better inside VR and completely makes sense.
Replicating all the aspects of physical environments. Like re-creating conference rooms. Once again, maybe it’s not the best experience to be sitting behind somebody virtually — like in real life. Just because it’s not the best part of real-life conferencing as well, and maybe it’s not worth replicating it into the virtual domain.
Just to conclude
The intensity of social life inside VR over the last two months has definitely proved that Virtual Events are here, and we will see more and more different industries catching up on this exciting opportunity to gather people in one virtual space while we’re disconnected in the physical world. I hope that we will be able to create good examples and set the bar for quality production, so that when things get back to normal, the value of doing some things virtually remains. To accomplish that, we need to cherish user experience more than anything else and rethink our approach to event organization overall. Bringing people to participate in VR actively creates magic. In VR, it becomes even more obvious that it’s a real human connection that creates value, and let’s put it first in everything that we do — in reality or in virtuality.
