B2B VR

has yielded some unexpected outcomes: It made the suburbs cool; it forced QR codes into our daily routine; it even made Big Pharma seem kind of heroic. And who could have predicted what would play out at a certain global human resources trade show in 2020? Despite social distancing measures and a broad pandemic shut-down, this event went off without a single hitch.

Jeffrey Kurtz

Design by

Mark Healy

Story by

True Romance

THE PANDEMIC

unlikely romance of VR and B2B—and with it, a new kind of virtual realm known as the metaverse. After a slightly slow start, consumer adoption of VR is finally hitting its stride. One estimate predicts that close to 60 million Americans will use VR at least once a month next year. And now that VR has had its pandemic glow up, emerging from its parents’ basement filled out and a foot taller, the B2B world has finally decided to ask it out. So how did they meet? What brought them together? And how did a guy who once staged the world’s most extravagant rock shows—from Lady Gaga to The Stones—get stoked about staffing conferences? We can explain.

so Begins the

Evans spent the majority of his career working for independent Canadian promoters who were eventually absorbed by Live Nation, the global event behemoth. As Live Nation’s head of global operations, one of Evans’ primary obsessions was U2, whose tours he directed for two decades. This included the 2009 360° Tour, a multimedia spectacle which set a new standard for concerts, both commercially and creatively; it sold close to 4 million tickets worldwide and featured a 165-foot-wide LED screen and a massive golden arch. “I used to stand by the stadium tunnels and watch people’s faces when they’d walk in,” Evans said. “It’s like, ‘How's that possible?’ Their faces would light up and kind of glow.”

U2 B2B

evans Spent

Three Pillars of Mass Adoption

and as is true of any emerging tech, the pace of widespread adoption is hard to predict. Evans talks about three pillars required for mass adoption—hardware, bandwidth and content—all of which had to come together to create, in his words, “an ecosystem that was diverse and robust enough so that a lot of people say, ‘This is worth my time and money.’”

VR Grows Up

Timing was everything,

Hardware

Bandwidth

Content

How? DNE poured whatever advancements it could into a revolutionary platform called NewSky XR, a browser-based, multiplayer, avatar-social platform capable of streaming volumetric video capability. That means you can stream 3D captures of human performance live in a virtual world. So if your CEO (or a virtual rendering of your CEO) wants to address the company, or you want Coldplay (or a 3D version of Coldplay) to headline your virtual conference, you can do it on the NewSky XR platform. And you can watch your CEO’s speech in the virtual audience, or if you’ve heard it all before, take the elevator to the rooftop bar and hang out with your friends. (They’ve heard his speech, too.)

And Along Came COVID...

They were still

NewSky XR has hosted 11 fully-immersive B2B events for more than 10,000 visitors. Its event setup can include keynote address halls, networking lounges with video chat avatars, staff training areas, and immersive, multi-user trade shows. Evans says that DNE combined “their vast experience producing decades of live events… with an easily customizable event platform” to essentially introduce B2B to the metaverse. And what did they find there, apart from a VR experience that allowed people to schmooze in real time for the first time in months? Trackable, reliable data. One surprise benefit to the conference hosts was the trail of data created by each avatar as they moved through the conference. Evans says the avatars yielded insights they’d never get from a live conference. “Who came to our booth and for how long?” he said. “How many times did they come? Where else did they go? That whole underlying data movement was very unique.” But NewSky XR might be less unique going forward, as more companies switch to remote events and a hybrid (or even fully remote) workforce. The work and events space of the future is going to look a lot more like Grand Theft Auto—albeit a fully law-abiding version—with co-workers collaborating or mingling as autonomous 3D renderings and executives appearing on company-wide meetings as avatars, rather than talking heads in Zoom. Business has discovered the metaverse, as both a collaborative tool and an events platform, and there’s no turning back. So welcome to the metaverse. Now get back to work.

Networking the Future

While still in beta,

Over three days in October, registered guests strolled through the expo’s 55 booths, wandered the corridors, and even mingled—yes, mingled—on the rooftop bar. While the event wasn’t in-person, exactly, it was light-years better than a 2,000-person webinar. That’s because it was all conducted using web-based extended reality (XR) technology more commonly used to play Beat Saber in suburban basements or do 360-degree tours of Billie Eilish’s bedroom. Thanks to Digital Nation Entertainment’s XR platform, human resources managers—or rather, their CGI humanistic avatars—could grill the avatars from Indeed or Monster.com in real time, as if they were actually there. And when they were through talking business, they could walk out to the next booth and the next (or more likely, head up to that rooftop bar). Try that on a Zoom call. “Using these avatars, people could actually network,” says Craig Evans, CEO of Digital Nation. “That had to be a first.”

See the Full Video

U2, 360° Tour (2009)

But once the tour wrapped, Evans found himself back at square one: “We just sold out 78 of the world’s largest stadiums and set a new creative bar for a concert experience,” he thought. “Now how do we top that?” Evans says he “started thinking outside the walls of the stadium.” The challenge nagged at him through the next decade, but it wasn’t until 2014 that Evans got a clear glimpse of the future. When he arrived at storied Hollywood club The Roxy for a soundcheck in advance of a special U2 performance that night, an eccentric German guy named Heiner Lippman was on a ladder, hanging a cluster of GoPros above the stage, ready with a pitch for

Craig. Let us film U2’s performance, he said, and we’ll show you how cool 360 can be. Dann Saxton, the club's manager and Heiner's business partner, had already gotten approval from U2’s management. Evans was handed a phone with the live stream of the 360-degree view of the DIY GoPro globe Lippman was still in the process of hanging. Evans was intrigued, then impressed. ”This was pretty groundbreaking at the time,” he said. He immediately saw VR’s potential as an immersive concert experience, and not just for U2.

Close to 60 million Americans will use VR at least once a month next year.

emarketer.com

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A B2B Love Story

“We just sold out 78 of the world’s largest stadiums and set a new creative bar for a concert experience. Now how do we top that?”

Craig Evans

Those pillars were steadily getting stronger in the virtual space—the hardware was improving while prices dropped, 5G arrived to bring higher fidelity and vastly improved load time, and DNE took it upon itself to improve the content by leveraging its relationships to build out the VR offerings. “Our relationships and network were already strong,” Evans explains, “we were already involved with live entertainment at the highest level and with some of the biggest companies in the world. So we said, ‘Let's build our relationship into the hardware side and with the telecoms.”

A virtuality reality in which people appear as avatars or self-styled 3D renderings. Comes from Snow Crash, the 1992 novel from Neil Stephenson.

Metaverse

Met

Marketing

When

the

company-wide town halls—is starting to look a lot like Fortnite.

Why the future of B2B—from conferences to

Over the years, Evans, Lippman, and Saxton kept talking and experimenting and learning everything they could about VR and augmented reality (AR), collectively known as extended reality (XR). Eventually they formed Digital Nation, in a strategic partnership with Live Nation. Lippman became DNE’s chief digital visioneer, eventually engineering a browser-based platform they call a Playsite™ that blazed new ground in browser-based VR. At the time, only a few million goggles were out in the world, DNE didn’t want its technology to be beholden to or limited by the number of people who owned VR goggles.

DNE’s NewSky XR platform.

Lippman's GoPro rig

metaverse

X.R.

Extended reality (XR) refers to environments or experiences that either augment or replace the physical world with elements of the digital world. This encompasses both VR and AR.

DNE’s avatar customization process.

building those relationships when the pandemic hit last year. Suddenly, Digital Nation’s relationship with Epic Games, creator of Fortnite and other immersive games, took center stage. The game-maker already knew what Digital Nation could do; in January 2020, DNE won an Epic Mega Grant for its CYBR platform, which Evans describes as a “multiplayer metaverse with advanced high fidelity graphics within social and entertainment environments.” In layman’s terms, it was super cool, a melding of the digital and the virtual worlds, TikTok meets Fortnite.

Event companies started to approach DNE asking for help. They were desperate to find a way to help their clients recreate their big annual events on line in a way that didn’t suck. And they were betting that Digital Nation could help. Before long, they were saviors in the B2B events world. DNE’s browser-based Playsites™ and the advances the company had made in volumetrics would be key in changing the events business and allowing for VR interaction that was as close to real as ever. By that summer, Digital Nation had event goers walking around expo floors, visiting booths, even talking face-to-face with vendors. “We could basically build a company its very own Fortnite,” Saxton said.

NewSky XR, DNE's browser based, avatar social-platform.