Almost 1,000 attendees participated in Ioterra’s 1st annual Product Development Conference (PDC) which was hosted entirely in the metaverse. The attendees comprised product developers, service providers, solution providers, investors, 20 renowned speakers, and 35 exhibitors for 8 hours of events on November 16, 2021. Upon logging in, participants didn’t see the typical Zoom room everyone has become acclimatized to these last 18 months. Instead, they found themselves to be a character in a virtual “4-acre” event space situated on a mountaintop.
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The visitors could move their characters around to explore the event space — visit trade show booths, engage digitally interactive artwork, and chat with other attendees. When an attendee’s character approached a second character, their webcams would both pop onto the screen so that they could chat. A third character could walk up and join the chat, and then a fourth, and so on. This emulated the experience of a real trade show environment.
The Ioterra PDC was hosted on Topia which is a virtual gathering and event platform. The decision to use Topia for Ioterra’s inaugural member conference came from exploration and some serendipity. Ioterra co-founder, Daniel deLaveaga, first experienced a Topia event at Virtual Burning Man 2021 and was impressed by the organic and entertaining nature of the event platform. “We are always on the lookout for new technologies and ways of keeping our community members on the forefront. Hosting a large conference in the metaverse was a way to have fun on the bleeding edge”, said Daniel Price, Ioterra CEO. And while there were certainly some growing pains as visitors got used to navigating the virtual platform, the overall reception of the event was highly positive.
“The conference altogether was superb. The vendors and speakers were fantastic, and the production quality of the event with the help of the Ioterra team was great!” commented a conference attendee from Balena, an IoT fleet-management company.