Bitcoin conference to use VR to keep remote attendees engaged

The decidedly precarious situation for live events in 2020 has seen a great many Bitcoin and blockchain meets and conferences go purely digital.

While this has saved a small fortune in collective travel expenses, it has been somewhat at the expense of engagement, with most events opting to simply stream Zoom calls or pre-recorded interviews.

So when the Magical Crypto Friends — a collaboration between Litecoin’s Charlie Lee, Blockstream’s Samson Mow, former Monero lead Riccardo Spagni and trader WhalePanda — decided to take their Magical Crypto Conference online, they planned to do something a bit different, by creating the whole conference in virtual reality.

Mow is also the CEO of Pixelmatic, the games studio developing Infinite Fleet, so a bit of virtual world-building shouldn’t be beyond him.

The Pixelmatic team has forked and re-purposed Mozilla Hubs technology to allow it to host a large scale Bitcoin conference in VR. It has added core functionality to allow real-time mirrored VR avatars across multiple rooms, and conference specific features such as management of speakers, audiences and content.

The 3D world was built using custom artwork in the signature Magical Crypto style. There are two stages for speakers, and each sponsor has a custom island where attendees can hang out with them, play mini-games and win real prizes.

Continuing with reality for a second longer, the event is also the first virtual conference to offer real swag delivered to your doorstep with the purchase of certain ticket types.

The Magical Crypto Conference VR runs from Sept. 25–26, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m  Eastern time. Those without VR headsets can also enjoy the conference through a standard web-browser.

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