#961: Reimagining the VR Awards Show as a VRChat World Hopping Adventure with AIXR

Daniel-Colaianni-Rachel-Knight
The first VR Awards shows was produced by Academy of International Extended Reality (AIXR) in 2017, and after producing three annual events in London the producers were forced to produce their fourth show in 2020 virtually. After evaluating many of the different social VR platforms, AIXR decided to go with VRChat in collaboration with over 40 volunteer developers, world builders, and modelers from the community to reimagine the conceit of an awards show into an immersive world hopping adventure.

I thought the awards show featured some bold and ambitious experimentation that was worth unpacking with AIXR’s Chief Executive Daniel Colaianni and Event Planner Rachel Knight. They chose to optimize for the Quest, which meant that it was a solo adventure rather than a group of experience. They also wanted to have complete focus on each world’s puzzle, interaction, and keep the worlds lean enough to be able to run on the Quest 1. It was split up into four chapters with each worlds featuring 3-4 different 3D scenes that symbolically represented the overall category. Each of the nominees has a 2D object that was shown on a virtual TV screen, and then it would fade to black and then reveal the winner of the category with a higher resolution model from the actual experience.

Colaianni and Knight talk about the challenges of trying to recreate the same level of premiere experience, with meaningful networking opportunities, but also recreate the overall atmosphere of tension, suspense, and awe and wonder that can come from these types of shows. Their focus on accessibility and optimizing for the Quest meant that there was a lot of other compromises ranging from polygon counts to limitations of featuring embedded video files.

Overall, it was really refreshing to see this type of ambitious experimentation with trying to explore new aspects of the affordances of VR in this type of awards and marketing context. AIXR lead a community-driven effort here, and it was through this unique collaboration with V Chat and the VR Chat community that they were able to pull off such an impressive immersive fourth edition of the VR Awards show. You can see the full list of winners here.

The VR Awards will only be in VR Chat for a few more days, until midnight GMT on Sunday, November 22nd. But you can check out the show in VR Chat starting with the VR Awards Act 1.

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Music: Fatality

Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So the Academy of International Extended Reality, the AIXR, they hold an annual awards event called the VR Awards. So they started back in 2017, and they've had three years of doing this. And this year, with the global pandemic, they needed to do a virtual production of their VR Awards. So they actually had a last week on Wednesday, November 18th, 2020. And instead of doing the normal award show where you get everybody together and they kind of run through each of the categories and announce them with a big group in this live performance, they actually turned it into a solo adventure through a number of different VR chat worlds. And so you're world hopping from world to world and it's got these little interactions and then you have different representations for each of the different nominees and it fades to black and then you see what the winner is. So it's kind of a reimagining of what the award show even is with the constraints of the Oculus Quest, as well as with VRChat and trying to do this in an accessible way within the virtual reality medium. And so I think it's really quite interesting to see how they started to translate this. And I wanted to talk to both the chief executive, Daniel Caliani, as well as Rachel Knight. She was the event planner in charge of planning and managing the VR awards. So I wanted to talk to them and see how they collaborated with the VRChat community in order to produce this award show. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And one logistical note is that right now it is Wednesday, November 18th, 2020, and it's going to be going until this Sunday, until November 22nd, 2020, until like around midnight on Sunday night. They're going to keep it open, whereas they were going to shut it down tomorrow and Thursday. I said, hey, you know, you should have it open just a few more days in case people have a chance to listen to this podcast and want to go check it out. So definitely go check it out and then come back and listen to this podcast episode. So this interview with Daniel and Rachel happened on Wednesday, November 18th, 2020. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:09.250] Daniel Colaianni: Yeah. Hi, my name is Daniel Kalyani. I'm the chief executive at AIXR. And, you know, one of our biggest goals is to further the immersive industry. So I get to oversee all the work that we do at the Academy.

[00:02:19.978] Rachel Knight: I'm Rachel Knight. I'm the event coordinator at the Academy. My main roles and responsibilities are around planning and managing the VR awards.

[00:02:28.644] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could each give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.

[00:02:35.148] Daniel Colaianni: Yeah. So it's a bit crazy from my perspective. The awards first started in 2017. The journey started in 2016, really. So it's been a 4 to 5 year journey so far. And it's been crazy. But my background has always been in marketing. I've always had an interest in technology, video games. From quite a young age, I used to sneak into video game conferences and attended my first ever award show where I got to meet people from Rockstar Games and things like that. And I kind of snuck into that one. And I really, really enjoyed what the industry had to offer and what was in the space. And that led me to work with two co-founders, Jamie and Kelly, to found a company that would be able to explore its roots in VR. We founded the VR Awards as a way to celebrate and a way to grow in this space. very quickly evolved into its own thing, where it kind of took on a life of its own. And we were left in a position where, what do we do with this amazing entity? What do we do with all of these fantastic people in the space who are wanting something like this? And that led us to found AIXR as the Academy of International Extended Reality. And now we do so much more than just the awards now.

[00:03:43.730] Rachel Knight: Yeah, so I mean, my journey in VR is considerably shorter and newer and fresher. My background is actually project management. I worked for about four or five years doing project management for software solutions companies focusing on the public sector. But I always had a passion and kind of curiosity for the events world. And I'd spent quite a bit of time doing some kind of personal development to try to make that transition from project manager into event planner coordinator. So this at the Academy is my first job within the events world, and also my first kind of step and journey into VR itself. Like I say, I was obviously previously project management in technology, so technology's already always been something that's really interested me. I'm always inspired and driven by the innovation of that industry. So when I saw the opportunity to do both, to explore my passion for events alongside innovative technology such as virtual reality, that was a really exciting prospect for me. So I started at the Academy back in March with the expectation that I would be planning the VR Awards as a physical event in the lovely, glamorous venue that we've used in previous years. And yeah, I can't, I can honestly say I couldn't have imagined things to change so much.

[00:05:02.815] Daniel Colaianni: I was going to say, I remember before we kind of sort out the formal hiring, I called you up and I said, look, Rachel, I know we were hiring for an events coordinator and then we talked about the awards and physical, but I said, look at the world right now. I honestly don't think we're going to have a physical event this year. I said, I wanted to prepare you for the eventuality that we might do something virtual, but even I didn't know what we'd end up doing.

[00:05:25.241] Rachel Knight: No, it's been a very interesting journey, but one that's just been so exciting. I mean, like my first step into the VR world and I could honestly say I'm sold, absolutely sold.

[00:05:37.163] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could talk about for each of you, your first VR experience and turning point to start to work more closely into VR.

[00:05:46.336] Daniel Colaianni: Yeah, well, for me, I guess, you know, it was starting off with like the DK1s and DK2s of the world with Oculus. And the moment I tried a really awful, awful roller coaster simulator, terrible thing, advised no one to try that as their first ever experience ever. But it opened my eyes. I was really excited. And, you know, I think it was at that moment where I was at a games event and I was doing different things with different people. And I was like, you know, like VR is going to be a thing and it's something that we should really look to explore and get into. And I was speaking with Jamie and Kelly at the time and we were like, you know, what is going to be the next big thing? And we were talking about, this was like five years ago, we were talking about things like, you know, we think esports are going to take off massively. We think that VR and augmented reality are also going to become quite big. What areas do we really want to focus on? And, you know, I delved into headfirst into the world of VR. And one thing I always say to everyone right now is there are no experts. There's no real true experts in this space. There's specialists, people who know their different things and different stuff, but the industry is still so young. The modern era of this is young. You know, it's crazy to see where we are at right now as well.

[00:06:52.514] Rachel Knight: Yeah, definitely. I think, I mean, like I say, I'm still very new and fresh to the industry, but like I imagine it is for most people. I remember coming to the office for one of the first times and being thrown straight into a quest one with Beat Saber. That's my first kind of tryout for VR, which like I say, I imagine is for most people. And yeah, it's just kind of the journey I've come on since then. Obviously before I started, I was aware of what VR was, but very much in that kind of gaming realm. And it's been really interesting to explore that further and just really understand how innovative and groundbreaking it is for so many industries past gaming. I think that's something that Most people don't understand that side of it. Every time I tell someone I work in virtual reality, they say, oh, gaming. There's so much more than that. Yeah, it's certainly been a massive journey since my first experience on Beat Saber and Quest 1 to now having tried all of these different training simulations and now owning my own VR headset. Yeah, it's been an exciting journey.

[00:07:57.813] Daniel Colaianni: Well, yeah, because, you know, we're part of the academy, like our training process when we bring on new people is we like to throw people into VR and get them immersed into different things, not just games, but you try to arrange different things. And, you know, the very first thing we do is we give everyone a headset to take home for a few months and actually try and play with. And I know when Quest 2 came out, we actually did a rebate scheme with our entire team where we said, if you buy a Quest 2, we'll give you some kind of money back to that. And I think the entire team

[00:08:25.698] Rachel Knight: Ended up buying a headset and it's great But I definitely borrowed the VR headset for a lot longer than what was offered to me It took them a while to get that one back until I'd bought my own

[00:08:38.404] Kent Bye: Yeah. So maybe you could dive into the first awards that you started to hold and then maybe some highlights over the years, because being here in the United States, here in Portland, Oregon, you're based in London and this awards was, you know, at the end of the year, November for me, that's the end of the cycle for me. It kind of starts in January. And then by the time I get to the end of the year, there's like this huge backlog of stuff. So. It's hard for me to do additional travel internationally. That's like not supported by the festival. And then now with the coronavirus, obviously I'm not really traveling anywhere this year, but maybe you could go back and talk about what I perceive as like this kind of like black tie, big fancy event, kind of really put on a show and also just recognize what's happening in the XR industry.

[00:09:24.766] Daniel Colaianni: Yeah, so I mean, I think this goes to our personalities as a team. We sat down again and we talked about what an award show could look like and what this space kind of needs. And coming from a techie background in games and different things, I've been to various things and they all seem to be a t-shirt and shorts type affair. And we were like, this industry means something. This space is that you're doing incredible feats of innovation. So let's try and match that. Let's do the Oscars style of celebration, but for the VR industry. And we got buy-in from quite a few people, which we're really lucky to get buy-in from early. And I think the very first year was supported by AMD. who kind of really kicked up the gear into things. But it wasn't until as a team, I met Alex Mahon, who is now the chief executive of Channel 4, a huge TV station here in the UK. And Alex really believed in our vision of what we could do with the space. And at the time she was the CEO at Foundry. And it was really through Foundry and AMD that we kind of started formulating a plan for this. But bear in mind, it was just three of us. It was just me, Jamie and Kelly. We didn't have any other team members or anything like that. And we'd never run a show like this ever before. And when I say it snowballed, it really did snowball into something that I don't think a lot of people realize how much an event like this really costs, because We ended up doing something where it was, you know, sit down dinner with a free course meal. We had champagne, prosecco, unlimited drinks and stuff for all attendees. And it's really, really expensive to do that in central London, as well as the venue and everything like that. But we knew that there was something here and something that we could celebrate. So yeah, we did the first year and we didn't know what to expect. We were like, are people actually going to turn up? And it's that nervous moment where you've got us behind the door and we're lucky enough to hire some really fantastic people just to coordinate certain things in the night just for AV and staffing and food and things like that. But you've got this moment where we're standing behind the doors and we're like, you know, no idea what is on the outside there. And then all of a sudden I start seeing people flood in with beautiful dresses on and looking really kind of amazing in a kind of black tie kind of suits. And these are people from all over the world. We ended up, and I think by last year, our attendance split was something crazy, like 70% of our attendees were from outside of the UK, with around 50% coming from all over the world, like North America. And we had people come from Australia and things like that. And it was crazy because I was like, they're just coming here for this one night. But it showed to me at that point how what we do here means an impact to people. And it was at that point that we see people coming in and all of the hard work, you know, we were working until sometimes 4am in the morning in the few weeks running up to the event, trying to get everything sorted. And we did a lot of the stuff in-house and to see everyone come in and really have a good time and have that enjoyable factor to it, it was really, really rewarding. And that's what's made us go into each year wanting to do more, bigger and better, and trying to figure out what we can do for this space.

[00:12:39.272] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. And then since the initial years, what would you say the evolution was between like 2017, 18 and 19, the first three years that you did this?

[00:12:48.820] Daniel Colaianni: I'd say it's just experience and preparation. You know, there's things that you pick up on the job and I'll tell this little story that not many people hear, but you know, it's little things like for the very first year of the VR awards, you know, we had this amazing, beautiful venue and some of our team were downstairs as an example, while the whole show was going on upstairs and they were preparing all the after party demos and things like that. all of a sudden over the loudspeakers you hear warning warning this is not a drill evacuate evacuate and you should have seen the sheer panic in everybody's eyes downstairs and i remember running for my life up the stairs to see what was going on upstairs. And I just see everyone calmly just sitting there enjoying the show. The presenter's still up there. And it turns out it was a silent alarm that only went up downstairs because someone was smoking in one of the hotel rooms. The event staff managed to clip the alarm before it went off upstairs. And, you know, it's all these like little crazy things you don't even expect. But, you know, I talk about these like 4 a.m. times in the very first year, but eventually, you know, we grew our team. We took on full time staff. We kind of managed to get different funding for different things and it ended up being by last year and what we thought was going to be this year, a very simple routine checklist where you just check box everything off and you say, okay, we've done this, we've done this, we've done this because we know what to expect. But that's when I feel sorry for Rachel because Rachel comes in having this amazing checklist and amazing thing of the evolution that we've learned and all this experience that we put together. And basically it means nothing anymore.

[00:14:21.500] Rachel Knight: That went in the bin. That checklist went in the bin.

[00:14:26.488] Kent Bye: Yeah, so maybe take me back to March of 2020, you know, the lockdowns with the coronavirus were just getting underway around the world, and you're thinking about putting on an event when everything's obviously socially distanced and physically distanced and international travel and everything. So, walk me through the evolution of deciding to do what you end up doing, which was to build a series of VR chat worlds that were actually quite different than what I expected what this awards show would be. I was kind of expecting, like, to be in VR, but to have what I would normally think of as a live show with awards and the standard conceit I see. But you really, in a lot of ways, started to use the VR medium in a new way that I wasn't necessarily expecting. And so maybe walk me through that design process of coming to that conclusion for what you wanted to do and actually use the medium in a way that starts to evolve what the award show even is.

[00:15:19.972] Rachel Knight: Yeah, I think, I mean, we started planning the event in the same way that I imagine most people planning their physical events this year in a virtual space. We started with the same sort of questions and the same sort of direction, which is exactly what you've just said. How can we replicate what we do at our venue in London in a virtual environment? How can we recreate that in exactly the same way with the same amount of prestige and the black tie, et cetera? So we really did start like that, and the evolution into what it is now was a very kind of natural process. We started to look for platforms to host that, you know, replication VR award ceremony.

[00:16:01.590] Daniel Colaianni: That was an ordeal.

[00:16:02.831] Rachel Knight: Yeah, and I guess it was that journey of looking at the platforms that kick started the transformation because as we started to look at platforms and we started to become aware of the various different pros and cons, the various limitations technically to these platforms, what could and couldn't be achieved, we started to kind of realize that actually replicating it may not even work. And even if it did work, it wouldn't have that premium prestige element of the VR awards. It wasn't possible to recreate what we do at Northumberland in virtual with the same premium.

[00:16:39.813] Daniel Colaianni: We've always been about premium, like the highest quality that you can achieve, you know, and we looked at so many platforms. We did a whole deep dive of everything. And I remember we even set up as a part of the Academy, we set up a phone call with loads of event organizers all around the world, where we said to them, okay, what are the challenges that you're facing going virtual? And we had this amazing call with some of the top VR event coordinators all around the world. And none of us in that call could agree on, you know, what is the best platform? What is going on in this space? What should we do? And it was at that point that after looking at all those platforms, we were just like, what do we do?

[00:17:15.218] Rachel Knight: Yeah, it really became like, It just became so apparent that we weren't gonna be able to achieve that. And so, that's when the time came where we all kind of was taking a step back and trying to rethink what we were gonna do. And then, I mean, certainly for me, the turning point was Travis Scott did his performance in Fortnite. And I remember watching sort of an in-game footage on YouTube of that. And that just completely changed everything for me. That was like light bulb moment. It was like, hang on, Why are we trying to recreate what we do every year in the physical space in a virtual space when actually we could do so much more? And why are we seeing a virtual event as a limitation when actually the possibilities and the potential in a virtual event is limitless really. You could do so much more in a virtual space that you could never dream of doing in a physical event for health and safety alone.

[00:18:10.978] Daniel Colaianni: It was me when I ended up joining some virtual events that were in VR actually and it was moment when I looked around the room and I saw everybody's avatars and you can't see this but everyone's avatars with their heads pointed upwards and you could tell they weren't wearing their headsets there was just all headsets up in their hands on the side and at that moment I was like nobody is engaged this might as well just be a podcast or webinar because you're not using the medium correctly like Yeah, it was why we created the physical world in VR, because that's the wrong way to look at it. And, you know, it's taking instead the medium that you have at hand VR, which is incredible, like Rachel was saying, where there is no, like hardly any, there are some limitations, mainly server side. But, you know, where there's hardly any limitations and you can change it completely, flip it on its head upside down and make it into something unique, something different.

[00:19:04.554] Rachel Knight: Yeah, definitely. I think that was the turning point. That was when, you know, we still didn't really know what we were going to do at that stage, but that was certainly where we were like, okay, everything that we've planned so far, screw it up. We need to start again. We need to think outside the box. That fortnight performance for me was, like I say, a turning point because I was just You know, I'd just never seen anything like that before. I'd never seen somebody do that. And, you know, it was so creative and so immersive. And I just could never have imagined a gig being as engaging in VR as it was when you were actually there, if not more, because you can see him. You're like, you know, just a meter away from this artist.

[00:19:43.540] Daniel Colaianni: And at this point you've got to realize we're going into April. Yeah. And, you know, it seems like it's a long way away from the award show, but it, you know, when you think of the dev cycles and everything that you have to go through for something like this, it was actually very daunting as well. Like thinking, Oh God, it's now April and we've got an award show to put on and we still have no idea what to do.

[00:20:00.647] Rachel Knight: And now we've decided we're going to do something even more harder, even more crazy out of the box. Yeah. So I think that was kind of where it started. That was where things all turned on its head and we decided to take this new route. And then it just became about, okay, we're an academy. We're not a game studio. We don't have the resources to do this. We're also not for profit. So we don't have the budget to do this. You know, this is a really great idea, but how are we going to make it a reality? And I guess that was really just about finding our team. Obviously, partnered with VRChat shortly after that light bulb moment, and then had access to this huge pool of people, this huge community that just literally love VR, and they love creating stuff. And so that was it for us. We were like, right, okay, here's this community of people that are just dying to get involved in something like this.

[00:20:54.036] Daniel Colaianni: And I can say, you know, like we sat down and we, when we explored all these platforms, we were looking at them and doing our pros and cons. And we were quite worried at first about choosing a platform like VRChat because A, we hadn't seen any other company or events company choose VRChat yet for something like that. And B, I think to a newcomer to this space, when you look on the outside to someone like VRChat as well, all you see is the memes and you see all of the, you know, all of those videos on YouTube and stuff. And it's, you know, But I think Rachel was right when we started speaking to people in the community and you do a bit of a dive and you realize how passionate people within that space are and it's crazy.

[00:21:33.757] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think for me, I used to go to all these conferences and kind of roam around in the hallways and do interviews, but yet most of the conception of what a virtual gathering is, is translated into the talk. And so you end up having functionally the exact same experience if you just have a Zoom call, except for you don't actually have the co-located gathering or the hallway conversations or the way to run into people and talk to people, which is, actually where I spent the majority of my time. And so I've been tracking the evolution of these different platforms and how people are doing this translation into these virtual events. And, you know, that conceit of having one event with lots of people in there that something like alt space with the front row system that has an instancing is the thing that I see the first iteration where you're just trying to recreate this process of gathering in the same space and listening to someone speak. And, you know, the architecture of the space is a little bit like agnostic. So you could be like in just a generic room, like a conference that rents out a conference center. And the architecture of that space is meant to gather people in big rooms, but the architecture of that space doesn't change specific to the event. And so I think this is probably one of the first events that I saw that Well, aside from Burning Man that had people generating their own worlds within alt space and kind of moving around, but this was using the architecture of virtual reality to be able to actually do a world hop from each of the categories to the next. And you have to then design the entire world. And I'll just sort of talk a little bit about my, uh, experience of the event, and then I'll have you sort of unpack it. Cause there's a number of different designs that you have to make. So you have like a, I think a two hour pre-show that I watched. So it was sort of like getting all hyped up for the show. And as soon as I went into the VR chat world, I was. you know, somewhat disappointed because the VRChat world was opened up before the announced time. And so people had already gone through the award show. So I go into this room and there's people who have already watched everything there and you know who all the winners are. And that's the first moment that I have this fragmentation of what awards show usually is, which is like this suspense of having everybody on the same page of not knowing who ended up winning. And so then I was like, oh man, I really just want to kind of go in and watch who won. And then when I go in, then this whole group of people that I was with, I'm now completely alone. And most things within VRChat that I've been into, it's a collaborative experience where you go into these different instances, but for you, you design these worlds to be a single player experience, which you know, I can, I guess, sort of see because there's different puzzle elements and there's different ways that people are talking. You want people to pay attention. And if there's a big crowd of people there, you know, I probably would have missed a lot more of the specifics, but I also could have also potentially seen more things from people pointing out stuff and discovering things or whatnot. But there were some puzzle elements that I could see that I would have perhaps been robbed of if it would have been a collaborative experience. But Maybe you could start there in terms of, well, there's two aspects. One is the live element of a collective experience, a group experience where everybody's experiencing the same thing, which I think is what I've typically seen in both conferences as well as this type of award show. But translating into this single player experience that has like all these other elements of VR that is way different than any other award show, like little puzzles that you have to figure out and world hopping between these different worlds. And so maybe talk about your design process leading up to this and some of those different trade-offs that you had to make along the way.

[00:25:07.053] Rachel Knight: Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right in that, you know, a traditional award ceremony, the main aspect of it is the atmosphere. And that's built by having lots of people in a room, lots of suspense, you know, even just down to things like the winner being announced and people cheering and clapping. The decision to move that into a solo experience was technical. The process of building what we were building, we had lots of poly restrictions and we also wanted to make sure that the experience was quest compatible. So that's really what pushed a lot of limitations on us. That was something that was really important to us, that it was quest compatible. And so we were kind of pushed into the decision to go with the solo experience based on that, to make sure that everybody got the performance level they wanted. That being said, you know, we did get pushed into that decision, but after that was made, it became more of a decision that we were quite happy with because of the points that you've just said, is that, you know, this is something brand new and we don't want people distracted from the small elements and the kind of subliminal messaging and the little kind of tiny details that people would potentially miss if it was a multiplayer experience.

[00:26:21.155] Daniel Colaianni: And I think with that as well is the fact that, so yes, it was slightly a restriction based on, you know, being able to get Quest 1 compatible and all of these things, but You know, I think as well is that we'd rather maximize the performance and maximize the quality of an experience and really polish it as much as possible than have to give away some of that to be able to make it 100% multiplayer for this year. Because I also think that as a medium, and we talk about this with looking at different platforms at the moment, is VR also has had to move very quickly within this period of COVID to slot into these weird situations of events going into VR spaces. And I really do think that in the next few years, that's when we'll probably feel more comfortable with something like that, because the technology is catching up for that, and the hardware is catching up for that, and the servers and the platforms are catching up, you know, to be able to deliver a 100% experience where people don't get disconnected randomly, or there is desyncing and all of these challenges that present themselves.

[00:27:19.765] Rachel Knight: Yeah, definitely. I think, yeah, I mean, that's definitely one of our key takeaways as something as a challenge we'd love to take on is doing something similar, but as a multiplayer experience as something where we can recreate the actual atmosphere that happens in an award ceremony, which is something that was really challenging to do when, like I say, when you're faced with, you know, poly limits and stuff like that.

[00:27:42.057] Daniel Colaianni: Even through our play testing, we didn't find that it's really difficult to create this atmosphere at the moment, given the platforms where they are in the space. And we did lots of different play testing. And this is why we took a different, a unique approach where I think it's interesting to hear from your perspective when you joined, because we didn't tell anybody what we were doing with the main part of the show. We only just showed video footage and things like that of the networking rooms. We wanted people to believe that this would just be a bog standard, normal, you know, showing in VR. And we'd rather set the level at that and make it something that people can then talk about afterwards than, you know, set these crazy expectations as well. But I think it ended up being very interesting because people joined expecting one thing and they left expecting, coming out really quite amazed with another thing.

[00:28:26.186] Rachel Knight: What I hoped for as well is that the attendees in going through this solo experience would see it as quite a bold move. It's something that we've never done before, and we could have easily covered our cracks and our mistakes by filling a room full of loads of people. But when you just put one person in a space, I hoped that the attendees would look at it and go, you know, they've not tried to cover any of this with distractions. You know, this is the first time something like this has been built for them. And I wanted people to really take it in and see all of the effort that was put in, particularly from the VRChat community, because we did give them quite a lot of freedom in the storyboarding that we did to add their personal touches in here and there. And it was those little things like the billboards and the marketing category. That was one of the places where we kind of just said, yeah, just experiment a little bit, see what you come up with. And again, like filling that space full of loads of people, I feel they would have missed those little quirky, funny billboards that the VRChat team actually created themselves. And so, yeah, it was really just, like I say, it was a decision that we were slightly pushed into, but as the project kind of evolved, it was one that actually became kind of the focus. Okay, what kind of quirky elements can we add in here that we know people will see because this is their own solo experience? They can do it at their own time, their own pace. they can check out whatever they want to check out and they're not being guided by anybody else.

[00:29:50.385] Kent Bye: Yeah, because there was like a pre-show. I assumed that when I showed up five minutes or so before the actual beginning of the show in the VR chat world, that everybody was going to go into this world together and we're going to have the shared experience. But then there are people who apparently had already had access to this world because it had opened up earlier than the announced time, which meant that there were people that had already gone through everything and that suspense was I guess my expectations were like, you know, changed at that moment of someone's like, Oh, this is what you're going to experience. And so I was told that before I went into it. And so there's still that element of the shared experience aspect of an experience like this, which I think is unique and different. And you've talked about this a couple of times, the atmosphere of an award show. And I think for me, it's that liveness of the live. Like what makes something live is that it's, first of all, in a regular VR experience, the liveness of the live is like you interrogate the world and that you maybe have a live immersive theater actor on the other side and they're reacting to you in a way. And that's more of a game or a theater performance. And this is an award show where the liveness of the live is more about the shared experience of everybody having that is the live aspect of it. because this solo journey takes away the liveness of the live and doesn't really focus on trying to cultivate that larger atmosphere of everybody at the same moment learning who the winner is. You were able to recreate that on an individual level by going through each of the nominees and then you kind of fade to black and then it comes back up and you see the award winner in a spatialized experience that you were able to then walk around and look at this art and get some sense of that nominee. But yeah, maybe talk about that atmosphere of the liveness of the live and the collective experience and what it is about that at the co-located event that you could potentially moving forward start to think about, is this something that you wanted to create that kind of shared experience in a collective level?

[00:31:42.286] Daniel Colaianni: Well, just before I guess, because you mentioned something there about that fade to black and, you know, seeing those things. One thing I just want to point out is, is, and I think this is where our finalists were also a bit, you know, wary and shocked, but every single 3D model that you saw come up on the screens in there and that you saw in there is actually 3D models from the experiences themselves. So we had a massive ordeal. As you can imagine, working with over 80 finalists to get 3D models and assets from every single one of their experiences that they made. And this is the beauty of VR is because they all should have these things, but no, because we actually had to restrict every single one of these models to what, like 300 polygons?

[00:32:26.177] Rachel Knight: It was 2000 polys for finalist assets and then around 8000 for winner assets, which caused quite a stir with our finalists whose experiences in general are a lot higher than that.

[00:32:38.909] Daniel Colaianni: But I want to say like you're in there, for example, when you look at the out of home winner, Those models in there are actually provided from Disney and Marvel. This is the first time actually ever I'm aware that 3D model IP like this has actually been into an experience like this as well, which we just thought was incredible and we were blown away by that as well. The fact that we were able to get all of these models into these 3D spaces.

[00:33:02.071] Kent Bye: Yeah. So well, let's go back to the question I asked around the liveness of the live and that atmosphere. And what do you think it is about that? You know, how to create that type of shared experience, because this is a good example of the difference between a co-located physical event when people are in the room. And I think there's something that you can sense the presence of other people when you're around them and you have a big event, which I think when you do the virtual event, there's something about that. human consciousness co-located in a single location that is ineffable. Like it's hard to describe and even say what that is, but then to try to even recreate that within the virtual reality world.

[00:33:40.221] Daniel Colaianni: So with that as well, so I'm not sure if you're aware, but we did our, during our user testing, we found that we could only fit a maximum of 12 people in a room if they were on Quest. The difference being is we found that we could actually fit up to 60 to 80 for anyone that was on a PC. And this is why I guess this essence of creating a live event really, really requires the hardware to catch up for us.

[00:34:06.355] Rachel Knight: Yeah.

[00:34:07.235] Daniel Colaianni: And I had the privilege just a week ago, actually, just after the show had gone, we wanted to test this theory out, what you mentioned in here about these shared experiences. So we worked with our technical lead and also the VRChat dev community. They do a fantastic meetup every Sunday, if anyone wants to know about that, where they explore new worlds. We wanted to test this theory out. Can we actually do something like that? like if we had the time and the resources and had to iron out all the bugs. So we ended up merging the entire experience together and we allowed about, there was up to about 60 people in this thing. And every single one of these people came through the entire experience as a multiplayer experience. Now, obviously it wasn't built for that because you know, fitting 60 people into a small cockpit of an airplane isn't ideal. But for me, that showed me what the potential future of this can do for us as a live atmosphere experience, because it was fantastic. It was amazing seeing everyone go through it with me. And then, you know, when someone pushed a button, they would actually move on to the next scene. And by the time I pushed the button, I'd move on to the next scene and find them in there already completing it. It was really, really fantastic. But unfortunately, we just can't do something like that because of performance. And we want to make sure it's accessible for people, no matter what device they have.

[00:35:20.388] Rachel Knight: Yeah, I think that was the key is accessibility because one of the perks of a virtual event is being able to make it accessible to a much wider audience than what you would be at a physical because you're lifting all kind of travel aspect. So right at the start, before we even went down this road, that was one of the things that we wanted to focus on was, okay, let's make the most of this and let's create something that can be accessible by all. So there were lots of challenges along the way, like the decision to go to a solo experience were based upon hardware limitations and still sticking to that goal of making sure that it was accessible for everyone.

[00:35:59.058] Daniel Colaianni: But I also think as hardware catches up with things like eye tracking, you know, built into more headsets and stuff. I mean, you've got one outside of the argument, which is, yeah, okay, this is bad because it can increase, you know, things like advertising and like things like that. But from an events organizer perspective like ours, this is fantastic because we can start mimicking these social features and these different things that come into play. within a virtual environment. And then we can also look at metrics and stuff for us, which is stuff that you wouldn't normally be able to do in a real world, but we can do in a social environment. It's like, you know, how many people ended up meeting each other, then speaking to each other after the event? You know, how many people ended up looking at these, you know, amazing key artwork posters and things like that, that we put together? And how many people ended up actually looking at the instructions? Is it worth us actually doing that? you know, next time. And I really think, you know, as hardware starts to evolve and devices become more and more powerful and, you know, things like, you know, 5G cloud streaming into these devices and things like that will really, really change the game for us from an events perspective. And, you know, we've been talking about things like, you know, how do we do hybrid events incorporating augmented reality and VR into these things? But again, anyone looking at the medium like this is don't try and recreate the real world. Don't do that. That's not what this medium is for. You need to take it from a blank canvas. You can't take what you have already. Take it from the blank canvas. Look at the pros and cons of the medium that you have at the moment and work to that specification rather than work to a physical specification.

[00:37:28.598] Kent Bye: Yeah. And one of the other things I've actually gone through the experience, you know, I have an experience of watching lots of award shows and I think there's an element where you see all the nominees of a category and you see a little clip that if you haven't seen the experience or you don't know who it is, you get a bit of a sense of what that experience is. And I think that was one thing that I think was perhaps missing from this translation was that me getting a real sense of what an experience was, because you're essentially taking one 3d asset from an experience that's like 300 polygons. And, you know, that is trying to be a symbolic representation of an entire experience. And, you know, for me, that just doesn't do a good translation. Now there is this element of once you see the winner, you're able to kind of explore around. And then, so I'm stuck with this. moving into the fully virtual volumetric depiction, which is putting a lot of effort on the nominees to be able to even create that asset, which they may or may not win. And then there's the other side, which is just showing a video clip of something that gives you a sense. And I think this is probably like, again, you're, you're running into the larger limitation of these companies are not already creating these assets to be able to advertise their experience within a volumetric context. And so as an award show, they're being asked to sort of like put all this stuff together and do a lot of extra engineering and design work for something that you may not even- You might be surprised actually, because the good thing about it is like, these are assets from within VR experiences.

[00:38:51.291] Daniel Colaianni: So they all have these models. They all have these textured models. It was just a case of decimating them enough that they would fit within a 2000 polygon limit. But I don't know, Rachel, if you can speak to this, because it's interesting you talk about videos, because we really try to explore videos within this platform.

[00:39:07.792] Rachel Knight: Yeah, yeah, that was, as I said before, this is a new thing for us and along the way there were many challenges that we faced based on technical limitations and making sure that the performance was of the highest quality, the finalist assets being one of them. We asked our finalists to provide 3D assets and animations, the reality of what we can actually fit within our world based on what they actually provided is very different. And then even down to wanting to display those assets in the best way possible. Obviously, we had a lot more to play with when we were talking about the winner assets and, you know, creating a completely 3D world based on their assets. But when kind of just displaying those finest assets, there's challenges even getting those just appear around us based on... But I guess from the video perspective, we tried putting videos in, right? Yeah, because we got all these fantastic acceptance videos from winners with our initial intention to be able to put those videos within the experience itself. But then again, running into all kinds of server issues, mainly from videos, to be able to actually stream them into the experience itself was

[00:40:17.553] Daniel Colaianni: And it's an important note to say stream because here's the important thing. Every VR chat world on a quest, it can't overgo 50 MB. It has to be a maximum size of 50 MB. Now, these video files that we have. that they were already like, you know, 250 MB. And the whole experience in the end that we put together was a maximum of 200 MB. Everything included. Audio, 3D models, everything. So the only way we'd be able to get video into this experience, and we experimented with this, was to stream it in. Now VRChat actually has a limitation so we can't just put it onto YouTube because what happens is we do an API call to get the videos into VRChat and then the moment it hits like 20 API calls YouTube looks at that and thinks there's a bot and a spam account here and then it blocks the video from being shown. And then we tried it with Vimeo. It turns out with Vimeo, even when you go into their maximum enterprise tier, you can only get a maximum API call of like 150 before it resets. And that wasn't going to cut it for us. So the only other way to do it was to set up a server to be able to deliver all the videos from our own server. And that is ridiculously expensive. Because we also would have to set up CDNs to make sure it doesn't lag. It's crazy. So videos is an interesting point because we did try to explore putting videos in. But with that 50 MB limit and also the streaming challenges, it was just impossible this time around.

[00:41:40.049] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think it's sort of liberating in some sense to be able to explore something new because the way that you show the nominees was something that I hadn't seen before. But I think, you know, it's still what ended up being kind of like a 3D model on a 2D screen. So you're already kind of using the conceit. And I was like, well, if this is a 3D model, I'm not just put in the world, but it seems like the performance limitations are really a driving factor here. But I'm just curious as you move forward to next year, now that you've done this iteration, if you're going to perhaps move more fully into this sort of volumetric conceit of one VR chat world per nominee category. Because you end up having, I think, three or four different entire worlds that you're hopping through. And that, I think, allowed you to perhaps push the limits of the trade-off between the performance and how big you can have for each of these worlds. And then having people kind of go from world to world, allowing you to maybe do a reset on that. But as you move forward, I'm just curious if you've thought about, okay, now that we've done this, this is what would be really great, you know, with still the constraints of limitations and accessibility, but thinking about like, what would a fully volumetric world hop of potentially every single nominee, then the trade off seems to be, okay, now you're talking about a 40 minute show that turns into like a three or four hour experience that people go through, which is a significant more commitment. But if you really, like, I kind of left through getting a sense of the winner, but not of the any of the other nominees. And so If we're going to go this route, why not go all in and just have everything volumetric and have each of the nominees have their own experience. So anyway, that's some of the things that I think about, and I'm not sure if you have any other thoughts in terms of where this goes from here.

[00:43:17.266] Rachel Knight: Yeah, I mean, definitely, we're starting to already think about next year. It's going to be our fifth anniversary next year. So go big or go home. I think that seeing the response from the show this year has been really interesting to see a response to a show. It's been a very strange year for events. I haven't really seen many people getting involved or engaged in virtual events, at least raving about virtual events. So to see that about the VR Awards was really interesting. And I guess in this journey, I've always kind of thought that virtual events can't replace physical events for that atmosphere reason that we spoke about earlier, for the fact that Let's face it, I've not been to a virtual event where my networking has been as engaging as a physical. So that's kind of the standpoint that I'd had all the way through this process was, you know, we have to do this because of the pandemic and the situation we're in right now. But my opinion is that the virtual events can't replace what a physical event can give you. Now, almost a week after the event, that's kind of changed for me, because just seeing the pure excitement of people joining an event that's completely different, and, you know, being able to do things at an event that you wouldn't be able to do in a physical, like defying gravity, and, you know, flying through an upside-down city, all of those things have brought kind of an excitement back for me that you just can't get at a physical event. There's pros and cons to both. So I think kind of where I'm at at the minute is how do we do both? How do we have a physical event and integrate the virtual aspect? The fact that you can have a much wider audience at a virtual event as well is another thing that's sticking in my head, you know. This year, usually the VR Awards is very much B2B. This year, it was B2B, B2C, hybrid. And that's because it was so accessible. That's because it was a public world in VRChat. So not only did you get the people, you know, the finalists and the finalist team, you got just, you know, the VRChat community, just people that play VRChat every day and have just noticed this new world has cropped up in their world's list and joined it. I think that's really interesting and that's something that we need to think about is, you know, we still want this to be premium. We still want that atmosphere that you get from a traditional award ceremony. And this year had lots of pros, but I still feel there's a ton of work to go to get the one part of what I see a traditional award ceremony gives you, which is the atmosphere and the engagement and that suspense. we ticked a lot of boxes, but that for me is still one that we haven't ticked yet. And it would be really interesting to try something like this again, potentially as a hybrid with that as kind of our main focus.

[00:46:10.977] Daniel Colaianni: Well, yeah, here's the biggest thing is AIXR is an enabler. you know, we did this as almost to just, you know, start setting a bar, you know, something that people should be aiming to overcome. We're not a game studio. We're not, you know, a specialist in this sector. And we've learnt a hell of a lot about what our members and finalists and everything like that go through to create these experiences, which is phenomenal. But the biggest thing here is what I would love to see is people to take this as a proof of concept more than anything. This here is a proof of concept of what could happen with events as a, you know, the minimum of what we could achieve. And to see people go off and do amazing things. I'd love to see things 10 times better than what we've done. Because for us, AXR is all about enabling people to do more. We don't want to do stuff for the sake of doing stuff. We want to do stuff that's going to inspire people. You know, people can look at this and think, you know what, I can do better than this. And that's what I'd love to see. And I think, you know, with more time, considering we started this in April and had to, you know, We did this in just a couple of months with a Solia, you know, mainly a fantastic volunteer-based team mixed in with our full-time teams. I think with more time and with more money, someone who's better funded as well that can do this, I think that we're going to see some phenomenal things in the next few years when people aren't just doing this because a pandemic has come along. They're doing this because the medium really lends itself well to it.

[00:47:35.417] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm curious to hear a little bit more of the other projects that AIXR is doing, but also reflecting upon that you used to do this one big event, and then your whole business and business model around your revenue stream around this event, and then how you've been able to adapt into going virtual. Because this is, you know, again, a really impressive production, but it's not something that you can just do totally for free, you know, and to be able to manage something like this. And so I'm just curious, like what the model for AI XR is and to how you fit into the overall ecosystem of doing other things beyond just this award show.

[00:48:12.307] Daniel Colaianni: Yeah, so the VR Award doesn't make us any money. That's kind of a first starter here. We subsidise it based on a lot of the other activities that we do as an academy. So essentially, ARXR, when we first founded, we sat down with industry leaders and we said, what needs to be happening in this space to do more? you know, what enables people. So we sat down with fantastic people like Vicky Dobbs-Beck from ILMxLAB, Colm Savin from Facebook, a range of big companies and small companies. And that's how the Academy sort of came about was based on the feedback from people at the awards. So since then, first thing I'd note is we're a full-time team. So we're not kind of part-time, we're all kind of working on this kind of every day. And we run various different initiatives. So the VR Awards is obviously our flagship event, but for example, we run our XR Generation program, which is a program which is aimed to support young people, 11 plus, and then we've got a 16 to 18 year old program, which is all about helping them get ready, career ready for the XR space. So we've been launching free online learning tools, we've been working with governments and industry leaders to be able to put together programs and support. One of my highlights of working at AXR really was doing this pilot workshop with some students in a group of 40 fashion students, nothing to do with tech. and we went through with them and we explored the XR industry with them and we polled them at the start and we were like, what does VR mean to you? What does these mean to you? How could you use this? All of them thought it was just like, I had no idea how this applies to me and my industry. But at the end of it, I had students coming up to me saying, oh, I really want to use this to be able to work out my textiles for this project. I really want to do this. Oh, have you ever thought about this? They're coming to me with ideas. And that's really, really a highlight for me. And you know, Rachel doesn't just work on the award. We partner with hundreds of events all year round to be able to bring knowledge out there, right?

[00:50:04.707] Rachel Knight: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the VR Awards is my main focus and responsibility, but it's not the only thing that I'm working on. Like Daniel said, we're also partnering with hundreds of different events internationally. We're hosting various different workshops, again, internationally, both inside and outside of the XR Generation program. So yeah, I mean, the VR Awards is our flagship event. It's a key thing in what we do, but it's by no means the main thing that we do. It's certainly not our main revenue stream at all.

[00:50:37.437] Daniel Colaianni: Well, we work with, you know, we're a membership organization with, um, I don't like the word membership because I think it's all about community more than anything. The one key thing that we do is when we set up and when we started this, we set up a code of, of what we expect from XR companies in the space. And as part of that, every single person that joins with the Academy actually goes through a very thorough vetting process with us. We check all of their stuff against the criteria of what makes a quality company in the space. We have really in-depth phone calls with different people before we even allow anyone to come on board. And the whole reason is, is because we want to be pushing stuff and content creators and different people out there that are doing phenomenal work and are really pushing the media and pushing the boundaries. The only way that we can do that is by building a community of people who are very like-minded and being open, being collaborative, who are up for setting standards. We worked with our LBE groups to be able to set hygiene frameworks that can be delivered out to any arcade and LBE institution. And the killer thing and the biggest thing, if anyone's going to take away anything, is the key ethos for me and for anyone that's part of the Academy is information is made to be shared. So people paid to be members of the academy. But a lot of the stuff that we do, all of these frameworks, all of the research and information that we do, we try and put it out there for free as much as possible. All of these webinars that we do, we try and throw them out for free to people. All of these frameworks, we deliver them. You know, we're doing a health care one for infection control within health care environments. And our aim is to get that out to as many health care institutions as possible so that they can can do that. I mean, information is made to be shared, and that's the only way that this industry grows.

[00:52:16.895] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah. And I guess as we start to wrap up here, there's another decision that you have to make when it comes to an event published in an interview about Burning Man and how Burning Man is an event that happens in the middle of the desert. And then it happens and then it's all sort of torn down and there's a whole principle of leave no trace. And so there's a bit of, it's an event that you have to be there. You have to see it and then it's gone. So either see it or you don't. And, uh, I know before we started recording here, I made a request to sort of extend the deadline because it. normally would have been ending tomorrow, but you're willing to extend it to the weekend so that if you'll hear this podcast, you can go check it out. But maybe talk about that other dimension of holding an event and trying to make it constrained or limited or not available year round and how, Hey, this is happening. This is live, or this is, I better see this before it goes away. Yeah.

[00:53:04.552] Rachel Knight: Yeah. I mean, like you say, we are going to extend the experience out until Sunday at midnight. So anybody that's listened to this can go into VR chat and watch the VR Awards experience, I think. Yeah, it's that, it's that toss up between, you know, we want as many people to watch the experience as possible. That's the main perk of doing a virtual event, right, is that anybody from anywhere can watch the event itself. So yeah, keep it open.

[00:53:30.507] Daniel Colaianni: You know, the thing is, right, is like, if something is available to someone all year round, It's not special anymore, right?

[00:53:37.237] Rachel Knight: Yeah, I mean, we still want it to be that premium prestige reputation of the VR Awards. And we want as many people to watch it, but equally, we also want people to be excited and engaged and also in suspense about what next year is going to bring, what the fifth International VR Awards is going to bring.

[00:53:58.605] Daniel Colaianni: Yeah I think you know like it is that case you know where you spend hundreds of hours putting this together and it is a kind of case of well you know why not leave it up when you know we spent so much time on this and so much love and sweat has gone into this but I think people appreciate something when they can only have it for, you know, a certain amount of time and it's only going to build the anticipation and support for next year's show. And I really hope that if you are listening to this podcast now and didn't get a chance to watch it or experience it, as I should say, I'd urge you, you know, on the site, you can register an interest for next year. You can get all the information and hopefully we can do something that's going to be even more cool and amazing for you next year.

[00:54:39.149] Rachel Knight: I mean, how lucky are we to even be having this conversation? If you think about a physical event, that's a one day event. Once it's gone, it's gone. So that's another perk for these virtual events and using this medium is that you even get the power to be able to do that, to replay an event which you wouldn't get with a physical. So it's another kind of reason to pursue this and explore it further and see how much bigger and better we can make it.

[00:55:03.272] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's certainly trade-offs of things that like at Burning Man, as an example, at the end of Burning Man, they usually burn the effigy of the man. And then it was a virtual event. So then it kind of broke and then they're like, Oh, we'll just run it again. We'll just, for me, that was like. perverting the original intention of something like that, which is that it is a one-time thing. It's not like you can burn it again and burn it again. So I think there are instances where you do want to have that constraint. Like the virtual market is another thing with the VCAT within VRChat, which is all these worlds that are built and they're really amazing, but then you have to go in them to experience them for the time that it's running. Otherwise, you're not going to see it. And that creates that urgency of needing to go see it. And for them, they're selling different items. And so that was actually one of the winners of the virtual market here of the VR awards. And I'm glad to see that they got some recognition because I do think they're doing some pretty innovative stuff there. So yeah, I guess this is probably a good time to say if there's any other highlights of other award winners or any things you want to sort of just call out, just because You know, there's a bit of a suspense if people want to go through this.

[00:56:05.889] Daniel Colaianni: I was actually going to ask you, what was your favorite, I guess, scene within the show? Because there's lots of different ones and we've all got our favorites internally.

[00:56:13.711] Kent Bye: I think the, you know, there was ones where it was like the up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, start. That was like, that was kind of, for me, that was like one of the more fun ones. There was also an interesting interlude, you know, just sort of like a musical experience that was just kind of like a break, which was interesting and unexpected and kind of cool to see. because there was still like announcements of winners that I wanted to see and it sort of helped build up the suspense as well, you know, to see like, oh, what about, you know, what these others, I think each one had puzzle elements that I think were kind of cool. And some of them were like a little trickier than others in terms of like, okay, what do I do in order to like make this progress? But then, you know, that's just like a normal VR game puzzle game. So that was probably one of my biggest surprises was to see the elements of puzzle that you're integrating into here. and that mental friction where you're building up that tension by putting something on the viewer to do something in order for the show to progress. But I think that served to build up a little bit additional tension as I was going through the actual award ceremony.

[00:57:15.748] Rachel Knight: Yeah. It's interesting, that experience category with the music piece.

[00:57:21.694] Daniel Colaianni: That track was actually composed just for the show.

[00:57:24.792] Rachel Knight: for by one of our volunteer developers.

[00:57:27.415] Daniel Colaianni: Yeah, I think it's Christopher Sanderson from Free Ribbon Studios. He made it and then it was kind of Joshua Shaggy Mummy. Yeah, that's his username. Joshua, who kind of actually put together the virtual experience and was experimenting with kind of audio visualizers and stuff within VRChat, which is really cool.

[00:57:47.095] Rachel Knight: Yeah, it's difficult to pick a favorite. I think, I mean, one of my favorite scenes is the marketing one. And I just, because it was really fun to, you know, we started the process building the storyboard. And it's just like, you know, me sitting there with pen and paper trying to figure out how I'm going to convey the ideas I've got in my head to a team of people. with no game studio software for storyboarding and not really any idea how to storyboard. And then like sort of three quarters of the way through the process, you know, started to build relationships with our developers and just kind of get to the stage where I was like, actually, you know, you guys just, this is a rough idea. This is kind of what I'm thinking, but I'd really love to see what you guys come up with. Marketing was a really good example of that because you know, I'd kind of mentioned this billboard scene. And then, you know, they're sort of saying to me, okay, what do you want on the billboard? And I'm just kind of, well, how many have we got? This is only so many times you can put the VR Awards logo in front of somebody's face. So that was kind of one of those situations where I just kind of let them run with it. And, you know, they were coming back with all these really creative, funny, quirky billboard ideas, which was just really interesting to see. And I think that's why that's one of my favorites, because that's one of the ones that You know, it was just a very small bit of direction and the rest of it was kind of, you know, I'd really love to see what you guys come up with. You've already had so many great ideas.

[00:59:08.758] Daniel Colaianni: At one point there was over 40 people working on this experience, dev team wise, at one point, you know, throughout the whole thing, which is insane. And at the end of it, I don't think people realize this, but we actually ended up having to 3D model every single piece of headset and hardware that was on our timeline, our history of VR at the very end of it. And we put those together and we based it off of a timeline that we created actually for the very first year of the VR Awards. We created a history of VR timeline. And it was, you know, fascinating for that. And, you know, I think it is really, really crazy when we're sitting there in April thinking, how on earth are we going to pull this off? Because, you know, you're sitting there with a blank canvas, a blank screen. And I know it was still like four months on from that. And I was saying to Rachel, I was like, how's the show going on? I haven't seen anything from it yet. And we're kind of sitting there in the dark a little bit where, you know, I'm not even able to join a Unity instance or anything like that to see what's going on. It's a little bit scary and daunting.

[01:00:07.794] Rachel Knight: It's a real testament to the VRChat community. I mean, starting it and, you know, figuring out this vision and looking at the budget, the very sad looking budget that we have to play with and thinking, how on earth are we going to get people on board to help us build something like this in this short timeframe? And then kind of sending out these applications and sharing these application forms.

[01:00:31.274] Daniel Colaianni: Hey, we still screened everyone that came involved. Everyone had to apply for it. And, you know, we wanted to make sure we vetted everyone because, you know, we still had to get, you know, NDAs sent out and everything like that for this to stay on the raps. And we even, um, we put together like a board as well, like a advisory board made up of, you know, like Ken and Ray from Magnopus, actually really great help on the, you know, just storyboard and direction. And, you know, people like Sam Watts from Make Real, who really helped with the QA side of the awards and things like that, because, you know, he's made some experience on that. And we knew that to pull this off, just based on, you know, how AIXR acts as an organization, it's about community. And when I say that this show was made by the community for the community, it really, really was.

[01:01:15.027] Rachel Knight: Absolutely. It was just so overwhelming to see how many, you know, I sent those application forms out looking at Daniel like, is this really going to work? And just the sheer amount of applications of people that just wanted to be a part of it was just like, so overwhelming. And then kind of, you know, onboarding them as volunteers, there's always kind of that worry. we're not paying these people. There's nothing really keeping them here, but their kind of sheer commitment and talent was really kind of something that blew me away. It kind of, you know, completely exceeded my expectations.

[01:01:47.510] Daniel Colaianni: Fresh out of college and, you know, looking for, you know, jobs and things like that in the space. And we've been able to, you know, part of what we wanted to do is help these people. So, We also put them into all of our pro networking stuff as well so every single one of these developers was able to actually network with people like Disney and Facebook and stuff because we wanted them to have the opportunity to find jobs in the space because I think as well their talent is phenomenal. Yeah definitely. Yeah, but back to your question, my favorite one's the arcade one, I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I said to Rachel, wouldn't it be cool to do something like Wreck-It Ralph in VR, like how we want to do something. And yeah, it was just crazy seeing these tiny little person and you're looking up at the arcade machines and you walk into an experience and then you get to play. I don't know if I should ruin it for anyone listening, but, you know, you get to actually play something as well when you're in the experience as well, which is cool. Yeah, definitely.

[01:02:40.893] Kent Bye: I really like the marketing scene as well. That was probably the most transportive, aside from some of the arcade one as well, but I liked the billboards and looking at them. But yeah, as you mentioned, it also reminded me of that last scene. I think that was super impressive to walk through that timeline and actually a really cool way to end the experience. I think that was the thing that I was really left with. I was like, wow, that was like way more, you know, sort of hitting above the weight in terms of, you know, having 40 developers that are volunteers, but people from the VRChat community. I think I can really see how you really leveraged that enthusiasm. And also, as you were saying there, you're providing them networking opportunities. So not necessarily paying them, but providing them potential career opportunities as they move forward. and to see how they could be attached with their name into one of these worlds and to see where they want to take it. If they're doing this as a hobby or in a part-time, if they want to make it more of a full-time thing or something. So probably a wide range of people that are either hobbyists or professionals and part-time, full-time. But yeah, that was the reason why I wanted to have this conversation because I was like, wow, that was amazing. That was way more than I was expecting. And a lot of innovations when it comes to how to use the VR medium to communicate and to translate something that is one conceit, but to reimagine what that experience actually is. And then given all the constraints of everything else, how do you turn that into what ended up being like a world hopping experience in between all these different worlds and still creating that sense of suspense. And so, yeah, I just, I thought it was quite innovative in that way. And Yeah, so I don't know. What was some of the other feedback that you got from the community after putting it out there?

[01:04:16.256] Daniel Colaianni: Funny enough, it was Jason from VRChat. Yeah, VRPill. Yeah, VRPill. And also Jesse, who's the CTO of VRChat. I think we got some feedback from just VRChat, and they actually told us, they said they've never actually seen anything like this that's Quest-compatible built on their platform before. Even they were quite amazed by it, which we were blown back by.

[01:04:39.714] Rachel Knight: Yeah, I think my kind of highlight in terms of feedback, I don't know if you can really call it feedback, but watching Thrillseeker, who was the winner of our social influencer category, he actually streamed his experience and his reaction to winning the award and his speech straight afterwards, not the one that he'd actually sent to us, but one he made during his live stream of his experience was definitely a highlight for me feedback wise, because it's, you know, we're doing something very different, very innovative. And I myself have got very wrapped up in building the experience that perhaps maybe forgot halfway through actually what winning the awards means to people. So that was really kind of humbling to see and watch his actual live reaction and how much it meant to him. It kind of brought me back down to what the VR Awards is actually about, which is recognizing success and achievements within the space and how important that is for people working with it. So I think that was definitely my kind of highlight, if you can call that feedback.

[01:05:43.236] Daniel Colaianni: I actually really enjoyed watching the streams come in from the after party as well. So we actually set up a world which was only PC compatible, but set up a world where we had a live DJ, Miss Stabby, really awesome. She actually DJs in in the club normally in Stockholm. And yeah, we had a live DJ in that instance, and we had multiple instances open up actually as well. And it was crazy because, you know, each instance can hold, well, supposedly up to 40, but they can go up to 80. And so you had people partying in VRChat, then we linked it in with Zoom and we saw people on Zoom calls, you know, actually having fun and partying as well. It was really great. And the feedback that I got from that was, I think it was someone from Virtual Market that came up to me and said, you know what is really, really cool how we were here in VRChat partying and we could see your team in the office also having a good time after the show, which is well deserved. That hybrid element, people love that. And it was great to hear that feedback from everyone as well. And I think that Virtual Market guys actually asked us, and this is the first time we've ever had to do something like this, but can they actually have a digital copy of their award? They've got one on their way to Tokyo anyway, but we've also going to have one in VR for them.

[01:06:57.664] Kent Bye: We're going to put together a 3D model for that.

[01:07:07.189] Rachel Knight: Yeah. Yeah, no, it's great. The after party again, I was just going to say is one of those concerns in the run up planning it. Is anybody going to join a virtual after party? Like the show is something else, but an after party where the sole focus is to network and there's drinks involved and that kind of stuff. Is anybody really going to be interested? And even that, the response on that was quite overwhelming as to the amount of people that really enjoyed it, particularly being able to meet and network with the winners and the finalists. There's no kind of segregation. It was just this big party where, you know, you could be in the same room with some of the winners and have conversations with them, which is something that I personally enjoyed going to the after party in VRChat myself to, you know, have conversations with people like Thrillseeker and Hickey. That was really nice. It's a really nice kind of surprise that people were very engaged in that side of it as well.

[01:07:56.765] Kent Bye: Great. And, uh, and finally, what do you each think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?

[01:08:06.708] Daniel Colaianni: I'll let you start that one.

[01:08:08.788] Rachel Knight: That's a difficult question. I mean, from an events perspective, which is obviously my realm when it comes to virtual reality, I think. what we did last week was innovative and it changed my perception of VR and its presence within the events world. Like I said earlier, I started this journey thinking that, yeah, this is a one-time thing. This is a response to a pandemic. This will never replace the atmosphere and the enjoyment that people get from physical events. And as soon as this is over, that's exactly what we'll revert to. But completing this journey has completely changed that for me because it's like I was saying earlier about the endless possibilities, the things that you can achieve within a virtual event that you couldn't even dream of doing for a physical event without serious health and safety considerations.

[01:09:00.740] Daniel Colaianni: things like zero gravity things like immersing don't worry the venue last year wouldn't even let us have fire like fire like juggling or anything like that so that was a no-go

[01:09:09.309] Rachel Knight: Exactly. When we do the physical event, we talked earlier about putting the finalists on the screen in the experience, and it's very similar in the physical event in that it's a video clip of their experience. But now being able to take that and actually immerse somebody in their experience as the winners, like we did this year, and then thinking about maybe as the hardware catches up, actually being able to immerse them in the experiences of all of the finalists and the winner. I just think, again, that's something that you could never achieve with a physical event. I think it's going to be really interesting to see what happens when we get to the end of this pandemic, but this event has really changed my perspective on virtual events and how they'll be considered in the future and what virtual reality can do for those types of events. I think, certainly in the realms of accessibility, and immersing yourselves in the experiences itself. It's definitely a step that I don't think is just going to be one step. I think this is going to continue and my perspective on virtual events has shifted based on the response of this.

[01:10:13.695] Daniel Colaianni: I mean, we all here within the industry are like thinking, you know, it's not moving fast enough. Oh, I need this to come out now. Why is this not there? But then you look at this and you take a step outside of our bubble. You look, okay, four years ago, where were we? Oh my God. Like look at those rollercoaster simulators. And then, you know, you look at it now and we're working with a fantastic company called Grid Factory, for example. And I've actually seen VR streamed. It's not a pipe dream. I've actually seen it being streamed over just Wi-Fi and over server distance type stuff and also in 5G. And I hate buzzwords. I hate the buzzword 5G and all of these things. These are actually things like I'm actually seeing become more reality now. I'm actually seeing the hardware get smaller. It's getting cheaper. I'm seeing the ability to be able to stream in heavy, heavy PC experiences that you could only used to do if you could afford a very expensive graphics card. And I think that for me is the future, it's accessibility of hardware and also better experiences in software. Because what's interesting from my perspective is I love VR, I love AR, I love all the elements of XR. But for me still, I don't even play that many VR games. because I want an experience where I can sit down and I can immerse myself in an entire world without having to do strenuous activities. And the awards this year was something like that. I could actually go at my own pace. I could explore this. I could talk to people. I could do all of these things. And I think we need to be able to move beyond games and more into tools and social elements that will really enable XR to really take off. And it needs to be rethought in the way that we approach these things. It needs to be more natural to our things. We've been trained to use a mouse and a keyboard and a screen. Whereas in reality, if we look at us as human beings, the ability to touch things and move things and look at things with our eyes is really how we were made to do things. So we've got to wait for hardware to catch up, wait for experiences or push the boundaries of experiences like we've been doing. And I really think that CloudXR will really enable that pathway for a lot of people. And then after that, sign me up for things like, you know, Neuralink and things like that. I'm all for that. I think for some people that's scary, but you know, that's exciting to me.

[01:12:32.940] Rachel Knight: I think in the meantime as well, coming from somebody who's new to VR, I mean, VR this time a year ago was something I'd never tried, didn't really know much about. And I think, you know, we do need to wait for hardware to catch up. We do need to wait for these things. to happen, but in the meantime, I really feel we need to be shouting about it. There's lots of great social influences, obviously yourself included, creating content, but I still have conversations with people every day who ask me what I do and I mention the word virtual reality and they say game. And like Daniel said, we need to move past gaming not just in a sense of actually creating content, but actually in conversations. Because still there are so many people out there who do not know what virtual reality is being used for in its best cases, like healthcare, education, training. There are still so many people that don't know where that's being used or why or how. And I think in the meantime, while we wait for those things to happen, while we wait for hardware, while we wait for CloudXR, I think it's really important that it becomes more communicated. We shout about it as much as possible because there are still a lot of people that... Outside of the echo chamber that we're in. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and I can say that as somebody that started in VR this year and prior to that, nothing. Like nothing. And now I'm sold. It doesn't take long for people to be sold. As soon as they start experiencing it and learning

[01:13:57.233] Daniel Colaianni: Quality content as well.

[01:13:59.254] Rachel Knight: And learning about the things that it's doing for different industries like healthcare. That was the main thing that got me excited about coming into it was, I wasn't necessarily a gamer, but understanding all of the things that it's doing to help industries like healthcare was something that was really interesting to me. And I think it would be for a lot of people.

[01:14:17.362] Daniel Colaianni: That's probably an important point because at ARXR, we don't actually hire anyone from within the VR industry. We hire a lot of fresh people to the space and we do that deliberately in a way because first of all, we don't want people who are preconditioned for different things. We want to be able to mod people and teach people, this is VR, this is AR, this is the way that the space is going. But it's fascinating to me to look at people like Rachel Hughes, you know, a year ago, haven't tried this. And then now we haven't trained anyone to be an evangelist. for this test. Everyone on my team was screaming and raving about it to their family. Chris from our team, he bought a Quest 2 and he was sitting at home and he said to me, you know, the oddest thing happened to me the other day. I woke up and I walked downstairs and my mum was on my Quest.

[01:15:03.647] Rachel Knight: I think she actually has a high score on Beat Saber.

[01:15:11.697] Daniel Colaianni: It's crazy to see my own team, who hadn't owned a VR headset less than a year ago, be one of the strongest advocates for this space. And I think it's why Rachel's job isn't about partnering with VR events necessarily. She partners with hospitality events, partners with healthcare events, because we try and get the word out to these different places. And we try and get the word out to students, to governments, to different things and push those, the real, very real thing. And I'd say this to anyone, we put everyone in our team through this as well. We put together a free online e-learning course. It's only about three hours. It gives you a very, very brief introduction to virtual reality. It only talks about games for a brief segment. It talks about the entire breadth of it. And we put everyone in our team through that. And I think it opens everyone's eyes to the perspectives of different areas. So if you want to check that out, if you have anyone new joining your team or you're new to industry, you're welcome to check that on AIXR as well.

[01:16:06.416] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, Daniel and Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast. Like I said, the way that you re-imagined the VR Awards into this solo world hopping experience within VRChat across all these different worlds and experiences that you create, I think is really quite an interesting and intriguing innovation. And I look forward to what happens next year at the VR Awards. It's sort of like an annual surprise. So thanks again for both of you for joining me today on the podcast. So thank you. Thank you for having us. Yeah. Thanks so much for having us. So that was Daniel Kalyani. He's the chief executive for the Academy of International Extended Reality, that's AIXR, as well as Rachel Knight. She's the event planner at the Academy who's in charge of planning and managing the VR awards. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, I was honestly pretty surprised to see how this award show turned out, because I was really imagining, OK, they're just going to get everybody together in VRChat and they're going to present the awards. And everything was pre-recorded. And so I knew that it wasn't going to have live talks. But the way they kind of reimagined it to really use the virtual reality medium to try to recreate the essence of this buildup and suspense of each of the different categories and to really just try to honor each of these different nominees and winners. And I just thought it was really quite interesting and intriguing. The fact that we were able to collaborate with over 40 different VR devs within the VRChat community, I mean, they were a non-profit and they didn't have a lot of money to actually pay a lot of these developers, and so it was largely a volunteer effort of the community coming together to really build something that was interesting and special. And I think for the developers who are involved with this, they saw it as a potential opportunity to be able to network with other people from within the larger VR industry. So certainly the ending sequence where they show all the different timeline of the different headsets I think were quite interesting. So I think trying to really think about this essence of trying to build up that atmosphere, that tension, and there isn't as much of the group experience. And it sounds like a lot of that is because of the constraints of the Oculus Quest. They really wanted to make it accessible. And when they do that, then they have a like a hard limit of around 200 megabytes per the entire experience for each of these different worlds. And they were able to break it up into different worlds. And so they broke it up into like four different worlds that you're going in between. and they're able to manage it that way but they wanted to make it so that it was like a solo experience so they could really listen and pay attention and have the opportunity to solve the puzzle yourself. I do think that because VRChat is such a social medium that there's probably a lot of people from within the VRChat community that would have liked to have this as something that they go through with their friends to be able to talk with them as they go through it. and just to be able to share as they go along. And, you know, as we move forward, I think we're going to start to see more opportunities for both the technology to get better, but also potentially some of the ways of distributing the content. At the very end, Daniel was talking about 5G and doing wireless streaming. And so I know that just recently as well, Facebook started their whole cloud gaming aspect. So, you know, imagine a future where there's going to be a distribution of this content that's coming over, potentially over 5G or over people's fiber optic networks. Maybe there'll be special Qualcomm chips to be able to help deal with some of this as well. Or there could be additional technologies above and beyond VR desktop, which is how a lot of the streaming is happening with the PCs happening now. So that's still a big question. I'm sure that Facebook is working on that. But as we move forward, we're going to be overcoming a lot of these existing limitations to be able to have lots of people within the same virtual experience and to really start to create that sense of shared presence of a shared event. And what's it mean to be co-located with other people? So I was really quite surprised and impressed by what AIXR was able to put together. There's a lot of different trade organizations and different groups, and there's kind of a mix of different motivations for why people get into here. But I can really see that this was a community-driven event, and they really had their heart in the right place. And I think that shows in the experiences that they were able to create. There's just a lot of love and care that was put into this experience and highly recommend people go check it out just because I think it's interesting to see how would you take what you imagine an award show is and to be able to turn it into an immersive experience and what does it actually look like. Like I said during the podcast, I do think that I'm kind of left with not really having a good sense of a lot of the different nominees and different experiences and that it would be nice to have some sort of either video stream or in the future, do some sort of like volumetric capture of a scene from the actual experiences. And so having like a virtual 360 degree camera that could capture the essence of an experience and be able to deliver that. That's certainly technology that I think will eventually come. And I know that even people within VRChat have been able to create these cameras to be able to actually capture equirectangular formatted monoscopic 360 degree video of these virtual worlds. And so thinking about other ways to use the VR medium itself as a marketing medium. And I think this is the essence of what a lot of what AIXR is trying to do is how can you start to use VR itself as a way to start to market some of these different experiences. And I think instead of just having just a short little clip of one 3D object that's projected onto a 2D screen, you know, if you're able to actually like navigate around some of these different worlds. And I think if you look at a lot of what has happened with the film festival circuit, where you have like these installations and those installations become a bit of this magic circle that you go into to be able to help prime you as you go into the actual experience. And so starting to see how there could be other contexts in which that you would see these different types of immersive installations and how do you actually communicate the essence of an experience through one of these scenes that could be delivered in an award show like this. So it's really cool to see how they're really trying to pioneer and push the medium forward and kind of set the bar for what's even possible. And just to do this type of experimentation, because I think it's frankly going to be from organizations like this that try stuff out like this to see what works, what doesn't work, that then drives other people to look at the future of virtual events. So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.

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