Alternative Stages
Online music events have been a thing for a while but they’ve never really captured what makes a live gig good. You can watch someone perform on a screen but the crowd, the room, the feeling of actually being there is missing. That’s what we were trying to solve with Alternative Stages. Build a VR platform where you could go to a gig in one of Brighton’s actual venues from home.
Scanning the Venues
We LIDAR and 3D scanned four Brighton venues: The Green Door Store, The Hope and Ruin, St Georges Church, and the Brighton Dome Auditorium. Recorded 4K performances with static lighting to match each venue’s look and dropped them into the scans.
First time I walked through one of these in VR I was genuinely blown away. You can see the posters on the walls, marks on the floor, all of it. Like the venue had been frozen in time. Still cool every time I go back to them.
Keeping Things Under Control
We kept the public gigs pretty locked down. No one could spawn objects or media because we didn’t want people covering the venue in random stuff during a performance. It worked fine, people enjoyed the gigs.
Then I tried something different.
My WoW Guild
I got my World of Warcraft guild into a private room and turned everything off. No restrictions at all. They could spawn whatever they wanted.
Within about ten minutes the venue was covered in anime characters, gifs, all sorts. Complete mayhem.
And they absolutely loved it. Way more than any of our normal users ever seemed to.
What I Think About Now
This is what I keep coming back to. There’s a massive gap between what platforms think people want and what people actually enjoy. My guildmates weren’t just being idiots (well, some of them were). They were messing around, being creative, making the space feel like theirs. They weren’t just watching anymore, they were part of it.
It’s relevant to the whole metaverse conversation. Right now Zuckerberg’s version of it is pretty sterile and everyone’s taking the piss out of it. But I don’t think the idea of shared virtual spaces is dead, I think the execution is just wrong. The most engaged users I’ve ever had were the ones who were given total freedom to mess about.
If this stuff does work out long term it’ll probably look a lot more like my guild’s chaotic private room than whatever Meta is demoing at their conferences. People like to play. They like to make a mess. That’s what makes a space feel alive.