Description

The recent pandemic has emphasised the growing need for virtual events. By merging video conference calls with virtual world convention halls, stages and lecture theatres, this project will increase the intimacy of a virtual event in a new and entertaining environment. Many global events are now transitioning from physical conference halls to online video conference calls, but video calls fail to deliver the same atmosphere. This project will showcase as a bridging platform to allow global events to transition to a more virtual environment that delivers opportunities that online video calls lack. These opportunities include aspects like the ability to virtually meet up with friends between sessions, ability to move from one session to another halfway through, ability to see hot spots of participation and even allow the elderly, physically impaired and underprivileged communities to be involved in something that would otherwise be impossible for them to participate in. The event will be hosted by Decentraland and run over 1 day in a format similar to a Pop Culture fandom based convention such as ComicCon (US) or SuperNova (AUS). The day will consist of an opening plenary, multiple streams of parallel panel sessions, workshops and a closing plenary. The streams of panel sessions will bring groups of panelists (2 to 5) together to discuss a single broadly defined topic from a list of categories. Categories will include areas such as Gaming, Content Development, Platform Development and Community Development. This project will also aim to build academic interest. By collecting and making data available for research purposes (such as the text transcription of all panel sessions) the project allows for spin-off data science studies. For example, with the application of machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques (such as Natural Language Processing (NLP)) data scientists may analyse all the session's text transcriptions to perform topic classification. Topic classification may be able to identify common points of interest and proposed solutions throughout the whole event. These studies could provide great insight into best directed future developments in Decentraland.