While virtual and hybrid events have taken over the B2B space over the last 18 months, full-on virtual worlds, along with discussions of the metaverse, have largely been left to the live entertainment and gaming industries. However, German-based platform rooom is aiming to bring the metaverse — or a “NuVerse,” as Andrew Nash, CEO of rooom, Americas, calls it — to the business event ecosystem.
There are a few existing 3D event platforms that allow attendees to become immersed in a virtual space, whether on their desktop or via a VR headset, but rooom’s ultimate vision is to create environments that span beyond single events — much like the concept of 365 engagement, but within a virtual world.
The rooom team began as a 3D AR and VR agency, Nash explains, and when the pandemic hit and everything moved online, they decided to leverage the tech they had already built to create a robust 3D virtual marketing and events platform. The company launched in Germany but has since expanded to the US.
In order to accommodate newly virtual events, “a lot of effort went into extending existing platforms and just retrofitting them,” notes Nash. However, rooom had the opportunity to build a new offering from the ground up and to consider, “How would you design for the future?”
“We spent a lot of time thinking about what was happening,” shares Nash. “And we wanted digital to be digital. We didn't want the platform that we created to just be an extension of what events used to look like in the past. Once you start to think of it as events without walls, and without boundaries, then they can actually be a product showcase, or a product configuration room, for example. And you can have interoperability of all of those assets across those experiences.”
Nash shares that it was important to the team to build an open platform that could link up to existing tools, such as Teams and Zoom. “We made some deliberate choices,” he says. “Make it easy to use, make it accessible, make it interoperable.”
This philosophy is also allowing rooom to build its NuVerse, “which is our metaverse that we want everybody else to play in,” explains Nash. “And we will actively promote creators, producers, partners, and their tools and their capabilities because we don't believe in a world where we build technology, and we have to do everything. We believe in building a powerful utility that can be available for anybody to do anything anywhere, anytime.”
If rooom doesn’t have a particular feature, such as gamification or scavenger hunts, planners can simply plug in an external tool to the platform through an API. In addition, rooom is very precise in its use of avatars, which are a hallmark of 3D platforms and the metaverse in general.
“Avatars are very useful for platforms that have small group collaboration,” says Nash, “but once you go into a venue that's got thousands of people, you do not want that many avatars. We put a governance on the number of avatars that you will have any particular event or any particular area — we're less about making sure that everybody has an avatar and more about making sure that it's a good experience.”
Last year, as a proof of concept of sorts, rooom powered IFA Berlin’s hybrid experience, which hosted 200,000 virtual attendees and 16,000 in-person visitors over four days. rooom was able to replicate the 3D exhibit hall, a particularly valuable capability of 3D platforms, since trade shows have struggled the most with the transition to virtual.
Nash shares that rooom made several deliberate design decisions with the platform, including making the experience available on desktop as opposed to solely on VR devices. “We need a great technology that we can put it in everybody's hands,” he says. “We think the future is all about inclusiveness and ease of use and taking engaging experiences and driving it down to the device of choice.”
Since then, the platform has held several other events, including a DHL event, which Nash shares attracted 17,000 people from 100 countries and generated over 3.5 million interactions over a 24-hour period. And, notably, “that platform can now also be renewed and reused another day for another event or another venue,” he explains.
The events industry has slowly been moving towards the concept of “always-on” over the past few months as eventprofs look to foster communities around their events, which is what rooom wants to facilitate.
“Always-on environments are anywhere, anytime, on any device,” says Nash. “So we designed a solution that can do that. We said, let’s bring 3D and virtual experience in as far as we can possibly deliver them, and then merge those back in with events, and that is what's happening for the future. Why have a three-day trade show, when you could have a 365-day trade show that you can now turn into a product showroom and bring people into that digital environment without having to fly people around the world?”
Nash also emphasizes that platforms like rooom are not intended to completely replace live events. “What the metaverse, or multi metaverses, have ability to do is both augment events and extend them to be always on, and introduce new venues or micro venues that can then augment other business processes along the way. In the future, we’re going to have hundreds or thousands or millions of multiverses, and everyone will have their own interoperable metaverse that will depend on what they're doing.”
In the same way the internet changed the way the world interacted and conducted business, the metaverse, powered by new 5G networks, will fundamentally transform our reality and open up exciting possibilities. Platforms like rooom are demonstrating what’s currently possible in this new world, and it’s only the beginning.