You’re excited to organize your next community event in Virtual Reality. You know the reasons for doing it, but you don’t know how to do it. In this post, I’ll list the key principles to keep in mind while organizing a VR community event.

Explore, test, iterate

VR is still a very new medium. Community builders need time to understand its peculiarities, and how they can serve their communities. Especially at the beginning, it won’t be all rainbows and unicorns, and getting everything right at the first attempt is quite rare. Instead, exploring, testing and iterating is my best recipe for success.

Luckily, VR shares many of the social dynamics happening during in-person activities, so figuring our how a community experience can be doesn’t require to start from scratch. Nevertheless, it’s a new medium. Best practices are shaped and refined constantly, platforms evolve, what other community builders are doing today heavily influences what others will do tomorrow.

This is why the way I suggest to understand how VR works is to get hands dirty and explore events organized by others. Being a curious community builder allows to learn about the platform(s) UX, to collect ideas, discover common behavioral patterns, take notes on how the space is built and arranged, notice how communities express themselves in VR… To learn from others!

While the VR-awareness is built, it’s useful to put it under test using the lens of the community event to be organized. Immediately, without waiting to have the full big picture in mind on how everything should look like. Iteratively, because modeling a community event in virtual reality requires to take care both of the content, and the (virtual) environment when it happens. Finding the right synergies between the two, inside of a new medium, cannot use something different than an iterative approach.

Follow (almost) the same rules for organizing an in-person event

It’s astonishing how much people’s behavioral expectations overlap between real life and virtual reality scenarios. Circles are naturally formed while a group is chatting. If a circle is small and tight, there is an uncomfortable feeling to break it (so, Pac-Man rule is still valid). Before a person disconnects, they generally goes around to say goodbye to other attendees. If someone is close (maybe waiting in a queue), it’s quite natural, and accepted, to break the silence and start talking.

The direct consequence is that best practices for organizing an in-person community event apply also to a community event in virtual reality. From having spaces to take selfie together, to reserving time for unstructured networking opportunities (yep, they work very well in VR). From welcoming new community members, to pay specific attention for attendees that joined in VR for the first time. From having a prominent and visible stage to keep attendees engaged with the speaker(s), to a decent volume of background music, not too loud to cover people’s conversations, but audible enough to characterize the space with a positive mood.
There is already a lot of material available, and I suggest to take a look to The Art of Gathering book.

Why does this happen? Because VR is truly immersive, and we feel we’re really somewhere, body and mind.

Carefully pick-up a platform

In real life, there are many interchangeable places where a community can host its events. In virtual reality, the different platforms play a crucial role in the final experience offered to community members. Potentially, all of them can host a community event. In reality, a lot depends on the purposes for the meeting. It’s an intimate meetup? It’s important to leverage the network effect of the platform to acquire new members? It has to be a fun moment? The main goal is to be productive and move forward in a community project, or to share knowledge? There are specific platforms for each one of the listed objectives, and I’m sure more will come in the future.

In addition to specific use cases that each platform focuses on (or doesn’t), there are also technical aspects to consider. For example, how many people the event could host (>10 / 50 / 200 / 1000+)? Recording and sharing afterward is important? What level of space customization is required (total terraforming, changes some details of pre-defined environments, ability to do it only inside VR vs importing from external tools like Unity)? How much the avatar can be adapted to members’ preferences (heavily customizable in every aspect, clothes included, vs standard and coherent, more photo-realistic vs cartoonesque, etc)?

Finally, it’s important to take into account the platform transition cost. Each user has preferences, and it won’t be easy to move community members from one platform to another. New accounts, new UI and UX, different supported hardware, etc. With the due exceptions, it’s important to choose from the beginning a platform “to partner with”, and try to stick to it as much as possible, to build the user base over time. Among the exceptions, a community of pioneers, that makes the “experimenting with what’s new” its reason to exist, or meeting for once somewhere else, as a kind of “VR roadtrip experience” offered to the community members.

This is where someone with virtual reality experience can really help, saving a lot of time while matching the community goals and habits, with the right platform to fulfill them.

Keep building the community identity

A common identity, and shared experiences, we know, are among the cornerstones that build a sense of community. Customizing the VR space, to make it able to narrate the community identity and bring out these shared memories, is a crucial element for running a successful community event in virtual reality.

There are two senses that could be leveraged in VR nowadays: sight and sound. If the community already has past experiences in real life, it’s fine (and suggested) to create a continuum between these past experiences and the current VR setup. Placing pictures of past events somewhere in the VR space works really well. Recreating in VR known places, where the community had meaningful experiences is even better, at the cost of more effort. If there are physical routines the community is used to (for example singing a hymn, saying particular sentences, use specific objects, etc) it’s a good idea to translate them in their VR counterparts. Music or songs that are connected with community memories could be used as background music. If the avatar’s clothes can be customized, why not creating a VR community t-shirt, and ask event attendees to wear it?

If identity and past experiences are connected with other senses (taste, smell or touch), it could be useful to place in the VR environment objects that can be used as a proxy for them. It’s (still) impossible to reproduce the taste of a food, but using a 3D object could recall the memory associated with the taste, and the experience around it. The same for a particular odor, where maybe the specific shape of the dispenser, or the object that generated it, could work as a good proxy.

Put accessibility at the center

Unless the community is VR-focused, chances are low its members have the necessary gears to properly experience a VR event, like a standalone headset or a PCVR. In addition, there are people that suffer from motion sickness, so cannot really use a headset. While planning a community event in virtual reality, it’s core to make the event as much accessible as possible, examining entrance barriers and friction points, and dedicate time and effort to lower them down.

For example, there are platforms that offer 2D clients, to participate in the VR experience from a desktop PC, or even a mobile phone. The price to pay is losing some non verbal communication elements, like head nodding, hands movement, eye tracking, etc. But more people will be able to participate and build common memories, reinforce their sense of community.

It is also important to dedicate some time to “onboard” people to the platform. Despite several tutorials focused on how to use the app, platform controls, etc, we all know people don’t often read manuals. My suggestion is to organize a video call on a quick intro session to VR, to align event attendees to a few standard concepts. This learning moment will also be useful to do hardware checks, like a working mic, make people used to platform controls, give them a glance of what to expect, fix errors in installing the app / 2D client, and will avoid spending time to fix problem while in VR, delaying or even ruining the experience of the attendees. Over time, more experienced members can run these crash-courses into VR, as an occasion to give back to the community.

Pandemic forced all of us, community managers used to organize in-person events, to interact exclusively using the online medium. I have no doubt that, post pandemic, we’ll be back to in-person activities: as human beings, we are genetically wired to this form of interaction. But I also think there is a third option, able to break this online vs offline dichotomy: Virtual Reality. To me, as community managers, we should seriously start considering to run some of our events in virtual reality, adding over time this new option to our precious “community toolbox”. Allow me to list the core reasons.

Online brought several positive elements, with two that really stood out: no more physical barriers to attend an event (not able to travel to the place, no time for commute, I have to choose between family / event, etc), and a considerably less effort for the event organizers, both in financial terms, that the time required. The same applies to VR events, and it’s already a huge plus.

On the other side, online events severely lack in two areas, compared to in-person counterparts: attendees’ attention span and connection opportunities. Both are not impossible, but difficult to obtain.
On the contrary, because VR is immersive, attendees focus on what’s happening to them “here and now”, without being too much distracted by the rest of the world (or, simpler, by the rest of open tabs in their browsers).
And because of the “spatial” element of VR events, where attendees can move around in the virtual space, during moments of unstructured networking people tend to naturally gather in small groups and talk to each other. Similarly, they can listen to a discussion happening close to them, and then decide to join it or move to another group. Or spontaneously start interacting with an avatar close to them. I’ve seen this happening to every single meetup I attended in virtual reality. For what it’s worth, Remo.co brings a very similar “spatial” paradigm to online conferences, and it works pretty well, for my personal experience.

Virtual reality experiences offer also several options to reinforce two key elements of every community: a sense of togetherness, and the perception of a common identity.
Going around in a virtual event, it’s possible to perceive the mood and the vibe, if attendees are awake and proactive, or just passive listener. It’s hard to explain, but it happens, like it happens for real events. And when the mood is positive and energized, attendees feel part of something bigger, are happy to be there, and not somewhere else, and there is a positive peer pressure to contribute. It’s empowering!
For the identity piece, the space in virtual reality can be customized to breath the community identity. From putting around picture of past experiences that bring good shared memories to attendee’s minds, to symbols disseminated everywhere, that are unique to the community. It’s even possible to re-create real locations where the community was used to gather. Avatars too can contribute to the community identity, for example by wearing a common dress.
All of that mainly because the intrinsic immersive aspect of a VR event, and the maturity of the VR platform used, in terms of environmental details and space customization options offered.

Another additional considerations it about the Gen Z and Gen Alpha habits: they’re already used to interact with friends and other people in a 3D space using a 2D client (e.g.: Fortnite, Minecraft and other platforms). So, for them, the transition to an immersive 3D world is pretty straightforward, I would even say expected.

Virtual reality is a new frontier

Of course, virtual reality is a new frontier, it may be scary for someone (like videoconferences scared some people before we were forced to get used to them), it has a learning curve, and it’s difficult to get it right on the first attempt. It’s normal and expected. But personal connections make all the difference between a group of people, and a community. And only in VR I felt personally connected to other attendees, similar to how I feel during in-person events. Something that didn’t happened at the same level during the many other online events I’ve participated in these last 10 months, no matter their quality. Simply put, I believe the online medium doesn’t allow, while the VR medium can, if well orchestrated.

So, you should try, as soon as possible, to organize an event for your community in Virtual Reality. Test and iterate. The majority of the platforms are free to use, or free up to a certain number of attendees (around 50), and some of them offer 2D clients for people without a VR headset. Curios to know where to start? Here I put some key principles to organize community events in virtual reality.