Fuckup Nights goes VR
Part 1 “Gonna try with a little help from my friends”
It’s hard to predict people’s behavior in coming months, even years. We all might turn into germaphobes and avoid all types of socializing, or say, Fuck it! and become all peace and love hippies. Hard to imagine Woodstock in 2020 and in all the event industry’s future seems very capricious today.
We played around the idea of a Zoom Fuckup Nights, but we have been using Skype and Zoom like calls for everything from talking to friends, relatives, business meetings even before COVID-19 and now they’ve become a part of our everyday routine.
But Fuckup Nights are a little special. There is a strange magic that happens between the speaker and audience. It’s also rewarding to see people stay for the mingling-party and have fun, meaningful conversations and laughs sparked by failure stories. We feared that we might loose all the FUN from Fuckup Nights.
The idea of going VR came from our long time friend, Arloopa AR/VR. We have been collaborating with them closely with Fuckup Nights. They made our Talking T-Shirts with Augmented Reality and hosted a Fuckup Nights in their place. Serendipity is my favorite word, it’s when you find something of value while you were looking for something else, and very often, what you found has been there for a while.
Fuckup Nights are organized in unexpected places. Church in Germany, a Tent in Mongolia, 2000m high lake in Armenia, why not try to take Fuckup Nights into the untapped territory of Virtual Reality ,with a little help from our friends.
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We looked through some platforms that can support an event of our size and specifications. All this is very new and all platforms have limits. We decided on AltspaceVR. It gives you options to build and decorate your own worlds and has a great community of creative builders, developers and educators who are not strangers to the idea of sharing failures. VR and AR community members have always been the most dreamers among tech community, they were always ahead of their time and dreamers have the juiciest fuckups. This fact makes us feel very welcome.
There are challenges. The platform is not supporting any of the Apple products. It also takes a while for newcomers to get a hang of it. That created a need to practice with speakers and organize a rehearsal party for the new guests a day before the event. It will also give a chance to stress test both hardware and software. (Talk about next time).
To sum up the Part 1 of article series, I have to say it’s been a great learning experience thus far and even if things don’t work out the way we plan (they usually don’t), I’m already glad to have found this new world, and hope so will our guests.
Here is the teaser of our speakers.
To attend the event download AltspaceVR and look for Fuckup Nights Event.
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