The first meta-event held simultaneously in the real world and in the Metaverse

On 5 October 2022, for the first time in Italy, an event organised by a trade association and addressed to an audience of business owners was held simultaneously in the real world and in the Metaverse.

The topic of the event? The Metaverse and its potential for businesses.

In practice, the Metaverse was discussed inside the Metaverse itself: a real meta-conference.

Joking and word games aside, it was a concrete and effective way of experiencing in practice the very topic presented from the stage of the events hall of the beautiful Wire coworking located in the former Biondi mills, in the heart of the Ostiense neighbourhood of Rome.

In this article we tell you what happened and what the result was.

The assignment we received from CNA Roma — which, in addition to being the trade association we have belonged to since our foundation, is also the largest SME association in our region — concerned the production of a thematic event to be held in person for a small group of VIP guests and to be broadcast in video streaming over web and social channels to a broad audience of more than 300 entrepreneurs interested in the topic.

The main goal of the informational and educational seminar was to provide concrete, real data on the state of the art of Metaverse technologies and on the actual impact the Metaverse may have in the near future on the business of small and medium-sized companies.

In recent years, our Research Centre has closely followed the field of immersive and interactive technologies underlying the Metaverse platforms, as well as the emergence of some promising products. It is no coincidence that last June we became one of the first Italian companies to join the Metaverse Standard Forum as a Principal Member.

Since one of the Metaverse use cases proposed by all the platforms that claim to address the business sector concerns precisely live events, we decided to implement it precisely on the occasion of the event we were designing and organising for CNA Roma.

To understand what was done and its meaning in terms of real interest for a company, it is worth clarifying what is meant by Metaverse and what the benefits of a virtual event in the Metaverse should be.

Let’s start from the definition of Metaverse. A Metaverse is a three-dimensional environment, viewable through the screen of a PC or smart device (smartphone or tablet), in which we can move and interact through an animated character displayed in the 3D environment, which represents us and is called an “avatar”. Several users can virtually meet in the Metaverse through their avatars and interact with each other.

According to this definition, most modern videogames — those used daily by our children on PC and gaming consoles like PlayStation and Xbox — can rightly be considered metaverses.

The advantages of this model for videogames are clear and evident: the gameplay experience is more pleasant and immersive, several players can play together and interact with each other even if they are physically far apart, each at home.

Let’s now move this concept into a context we have learned to know and experience often during the pandemic: the streaming event or webinar.

You sat in front of your computer screen, initially facing a screen with a message that more or less read: “the organiser of the meeting/webinar has been notified that you are here and you will be connected shortly when the meeting/webinar starts…”.

Later the screen changed: initially black but with a backdrop of sounds, whistles, scattered words, voices of small children being shooed out of rooms; and then a mosaic of little faces, with one big face in the foreground starting to speak, then a slide screen with a speech in the background. If you muted your mic and turned off your webcam you could do other things in your room while the event ran in the background. Sometimes you would notice a red dot on the chat icon and find a string of messages oscillating between “we can’t hear anything”, “now we can”, “your mic is off”, to “sorry I have to go, thanks everyone”.

Well, the Metaverse, among other things, promises to improve this experience. Does it succeed?

We do not yet have a rock-solid affirmative answer, but here is how things went on 5 October.

Participants registered for the event received an email with instructions and a link inviting them to register on the Metaverse platform we had decided to use, Spatial.io, and to create their own avatar.

Anyone who had the patience to do this operation could attend the event in the virtual auditorium of CNA Roma that we had created for the occasion.

Registrations were just over 300. Browsing the list of entrepreneurs and craftspeople at random you could find bakers, goldsmiths, dentists, farmers, retailers, carpenters, IT firms, graphic designers, photographers, web agencies, mechanical and metalworking industries, restorers, etc.

On the day of the event, the real auditorium of the coworking hosting the event began to fill up. The VIP invitation called for the utmost punctuality, since we could not keep waiting the 300 guests registered for the traditional live streaming. The order given to the production team was to start at 18:05 — whoever is here is here; for the latecomers in the room there would still be the recorded video.

During the minutes preceding the start of the event, the usual things happened: in-person guests greeted each other at the entrance and chatted while taking their seats after exploring the surroundings and admiring the host coworking’s setup; users connected to the streaming saw on their PC or smartphone the welcome screen with the message announcing the imminent start of the event.

And in the Metaverse?

From our production and hosting-control stations on Spatial.io, with (unjustified) surprise we noticed that the virtual auditorium was beginning to fill with little animated puppets — pardon, with avatars — that moved around exploring the virtual space, read the posters on the walls and, above all, talked, talked with other avatars present. Soon they discovered that if their avatar was close to other avatars they could hear their voices, while the voices of avatars talking to each other further away were inaudible, or audible only very faintly.

Once the event started, in the virtual auditorium the avatar of the speaker on stage stood at the centre and their voice was always clearly audible to everyone, regardless of distance. It was possible to leave the microphone on without the local sound captured in the user’s physical environment being broadcast and disturbing the audience, and by turning the avatar towards a neighbour it was still possible to hold a conversation, though disturbed by the speaker’s audio just as in a real theatre.

For those who owned a Meta Quest headset, it was possible to be truly immersed in the virtual auditorium. In the room we had four Meta Quest 2 headsets available; those who tried them could experience the auditorium in virtual reality, enhanced by audio spatialisation.

Was it all this perfect? Obviously not entirely. By our estimates, more than 60 people had created their account in the Metaverse, but only about fifty managed to connect and take part. You need a relatively powerful PC and a good Internet connection. When the audience in the virtual auditorium exceeded 40, latecomers started having sync issues — what they saw on their screens was not exactly what others, including us in the production team, were seeing — and we could not load the speakers’ slides on the virtual mega-screen due to a platform bug fixed a few days later.

Overall it was an interesting and broadly successful experiment — so much so that we will keep this format also in the next events scheduled by CNA Roma.

How did we technically do all this? We will tell you soon in a follow-up, more technical article.