There are conferences and expos which simply don’t work when people cannot be around to try out, touch and feel products and beginn client meetings with traditional handshakes. Just imagine how much fun an online food expo must be.
Fortunately, that has never been the problem with an XR conference like Laval Virtual in France. Moving around in a virtual environment seems natural to many people who have spent more than an hour or two in Social VR experiences.
Our CEO Sven, who loves all kinds of VR as he is quite the nerd, was invited to show the features of our Volucap studio in a presentation at Laval Virtual. Afterwards he shared his insights on a panel that took place in the virtual conference center.
He and four other avatars talked about the future of the headset, XR for social and gaming, the dawn of the Metaverse and of course the impact of the pandemic on our industry. All this in front of an audience consisting of avatars as well.
We see the adaption of virtual conferences as one step to the Metaverse. Once there are standard avatars one can use and completely customize (not only Facebook is having this vision), jumping from one experience to the other will be easy as cake. Visiting virtual conferences will become be a common thing to do, among others.
And if you don’t want to be represented by cartoonish characters, you will be able to use volumetric versions of yourself. Check out Alex Kipman’s keynote at Micosoft’s Ignite conference. Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Technical Fellow is presenting on a virtual stage, using an array of depth-sensing Azure Kinect cameras which create a volumetric 3D video capture of himself. This is for example what collaboration in Microsoft Mesh is all about. Using real life versions of yourself for immersive collaboration.
We’re looking forward to represent Volucap on more virtual conferences in the future. And here and there we’ll be present IRL, too.
