In a small ballroom at the Parker Resort in Palm Springs, we hosted about 125 of the most influential executives in global media for a conference featuring presentations by some of the most influential thought leaders in the world on topics from Artificial Intelligence to Third-World Architecture to Middle Eastern Politics to winning the Tour de France.
James Murdoch, who hosted the event, wanted this audience to understand the power of Virtual Reality, so he asked us to put together a demo. We got our hands on 125 Samsung GEAR VR headsets and 125 over-ear headphones. We configured them and installed software to allow the playback of a short VR movie produced specifically for this audience. The idea was for all of the attendees to experience the same demo at the same time.
Since we couldn’t guarantee enough internet bandwidth to send the video to all attendee headsets simultaneously, we pre-loaded the video file on each device and software developers in LA designed a remote trigger system so that once all attendees had their headsets on, we could cue the start of the film.
I actually took a hands-on approach and jumped onstage to walk the audience step-by-step through the process of getting the headsets on and functioning. Once we had the audience all set (with a few interventions by crew in the room), we let the folks in LA know over the phone to press the play button.
It was amazing to watch in a silent room while everyone moved and flinched and reacted in their own virtual world to the same demo. As the film ended and the audience removed their headsets, the sense of awe was palpable. The eperience would not have been the same if their headsets were not in sync with each other.
This demo was a world-first and won the agency an award.
On top of all that, most of our production crew ran the show from a Star Waggon in the parking lot due to the limited room size.