Fairground Festival: Pioneers in the Metaverse

Back in early 2020, the organizers ventured into the virtual festival world with rooom, at the time still known as Beatpatrol in the Austrian party community. The aim was to bring a strong festival brand with Austria’s largest indoor festival to Germany and the Hanover location. Working together with rooom, a visualization of areas for sponsors was planned using 3D technology: The 3D professionals digitized the event location, one of Hannover’s exhibition halls, and then brought it to life virtually. Promotional space could be branded for a visual presentation of sponsorship opportunities, and logos of potential sponsors could be added.

The digital project then reached the next level in early 2022. After the event originally planned for 2020 had already been postponed once due to the pandemic, new restrictions were imposed and it was clear that the live party on site could not take place as planned. So it was all the better that the event location had already been transformed into a walkable 3D space. The organizers decided without further ado to host the festival digitally with an event platform. This way, the party people at the "Beatpatrol Evolution" in March 2022 could celebrate as avatars to a livestream in the virtual exhibition hall despite the contact restrictions.

And this is what the rave in the Metaverse looked like:

Despite the success, when talking to the event organizers, there is a feeling that the festival and music industry still struggle with digital solutions. But what are the reasons? One challenge with large virtual events is performance. When several hundred or even thousands of visitors call up the online space at the same time and want to interact with each other via avatar, this takes up a certain amount of computing capacity. This can lead to prolonged loading times or even crashes of the experience for users. To prevent such inconveniences, the organizers opted for a simple but effective avatar system. This made it possible to make optimal use of resources and keep the computing power required by the end users as low as possible.

The topic of mobile usability is also particularly relevant for the target group, which prefers to consume content on a smartphone. Event platforms must therefore be optimized accordingly and make content available on a wide range of devices. And last but not least, the Metaverse and the associated added values have not yet been understood by all consumers - a lot of educational work still needs to be done here. With the Metaverse information stand and rooomPortal, the Fairground Festival has taken the right path to make virtual worlds more comprehensible to the party crowd.

To sum up: The Fairground Festival has done valuable pioneering work in the field of virtual and hybrid festivals. The organizers have led the way boldly and shown what can be achieved with a hybrid party concept. The successful combination of physical and digital elements points the way forward for the event industry. As technology continues to advance, the challenges can also be met even more efficiently in the future. We are working day by day to make the Metaverse accessible to ALL – for the shared dream of a barrier- and boundary-free community.