COVID-19: Recreating virtual events as how they happen in the real world

The Covid outbreak has presented marketeers and event agencies with opportunity and task to take their experiences online. It is challenging and difficult for one platform to understand and give all abilities to marketeer to build an experience of their liking.

Everyone at this moment is exploring and curating what best can come out of online virtual events. This exploration will put together a firm base of a stronger understanding of expectation and capabilities that digital marketers will look for in virtual events platforms of the future. EC speaks with Nikhil Joshi, Co-founder, Digital Jalebi.

How is Digital Jalebi transforming in-person events into virtual ones?
The idea of events in spaces is about exploration, moving through space, meeting people and experiencing the ambience.

We are building an experiential platform to recreate how experience happens in the real world without the need for users to get out of comfort of their home.

This also gives the marketeers to build virtual spaces that go beyond any physical constraints. Also scaling a virtual platform to reach hundreds of thousands of people is easier than never before because of the quick and robust scalable infrastructure that is now available readily.

What kind of technologies are you incorporating to create such virtual events? Where are you sourcing them from?
We are using HTML5 based real time 3D environments to recreate event spaces. These real time environments will allow users to roam through spaces just like the physical one. With advancement on webGL, more and more complex and hyper realistic spaces and experiences in 3D can now be built and published on the web.

More and more work has happened on web enabled computer vision, which largely lets us detect gestures, faces, motion and spaces (Floor). With such awareness, we are able to build experiences like Augmented Reality using browsers, voice enabled interfaces and artificially intelligent chat engines to power several engaging experiences.

Do you have an app to run virtual events? Which mobile platform configurations, do you keep in mind?
The Platform is web based and runs on any browser for laptop and mobile phones.

The success of any such platform will depend on its scalability and the ease with which it can run on literally any device (Laptops or Mobiles) / The application is developed and optimized to take in account factors like resolution of device, internet speed and computation power.

What kinds of companies are approaching you for the virtual events?
Marketing firms, Marketing teams and event agencies are approaching us to understand how their physical events and marketing plans can be executed using such a platform.

Also, virtual platforms will enable direct clients and any other person to easily configure and put together an experiential event for himself.

What type of companies should switch to such events? How will it be helpful in gaining profits for them?
Every kind of business should move some part of their marketing and events initiatives to virtual online platforms, this makes them shockproof from any such unexpected situations in future. The brands are able to leverage the highly quantifiable insights that can easily be generated using these platforms to help with building better user or customer traction and gets converted into profits.

What kind of bandwidth is required to run virtual events?
An average internet connection and any mobile or computing device. The entry barrier is very low for such platforms.

In a physical event, time is a constraint, Virtual events don’t have time dependencies. Are you going to host 24×7 events?
It’s a debatable question. We think the charm and magic of powerful virtual events would be in working like physical events. They need to have time and other constraints but make possible engagements in a more comfortable and personalized way.

Though the live and mail events might go on for a couple hours, the web platform holding it would allow visitors to see the older streams, feedback, request for contacts for networking and experience experiential engagements. This idea allows the virtual platform to extend the events beyond the schedule and set of speakers or any contained imposed by space and time.