Last week, Microsoft became the first major technology company to host a presentation entirely in virtual reality. Despite many moving parts, the company has managed to deliver a perfect and engaging presentation that can mark the future of this type of marketing communication.
In the past 20 years, the ‘technology talk’ has gone from rushed PowerPoint presentations in front of small groups to large multimedia productions that form the basis of many marketing manuals, often concluding with important announcements and product revelations.
Last week, Microsoft took the next step towards a possible future of the technology talk by giving the opening presentation of its Ignite 2021 developer conference entirely in virtual reality.
Although far from being the first company to deliver a virtual reality presentation, Microsoft – with a market value of $ 1.73 trillion – is certainly the largest company to do so. And his presentation was perhaps the most ambitious and most polished we have ever seen, with personalized scenes that brought together immersive and traditional media. Increasing the complexity of the execution is the fact that the lecture was designed for viewing in VR and through a non-immersive live broadcast to a wider audience.
If you want to see everything, you can watch a recording here. Below, we’ll see an overview of how it all happened from the VR perspective.
A scenario defined in Altspace
Microsoft hosted the entire Ignite talk within Altspace, the social VR platform that the company acquired in 2017. As a Microsoft product, the company had a much more exclusive scope for production than would be possible in a ready-to-use solution.
Anyone, anywhere in the world, with access to Altspace was able to attend the presentation and get a front row seat for the keynote. The setup was as you might expect: a seating section for the audience and a stage to frame the action. And while hundreds of users participated in the event in virtual reality, they were divided into multiple instances of approximately 25 members of the public. Thus, while the audience was divided between several rooms, everyone watched exactly the same presentation taking place at the same time.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella opens with a video speech
To be clear, the Microsoft Ignite 2021 virtual reality lecture was not just a small experiment for the company. This was an event large enough to be seen by enough people to justify Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as the keynote speaker, who described the company’s vision for the future of corporate computing.
And while they didn’t go that far to bring Nadella himself into virtual reality (his video segment was shown on a big cinema-like screen), it was Nadella who was the first to announce Microsoft Mesh, which the company expects that will drive immersive computing and collaboration, bringing a future where virtual reality events – like the Ignite 2021 lecture – are common.
Alex Kipman on stage ‘in person’
While the virtual reality audience of the lecture was all represented by cartoons Altspace avatars, visionary HoloLens Alex Kipman was shown on stage in a live performance wearing a HoloLens 2 headset. Around him was a stage designed to look like a coral reef, with the surrounding scene transformed to make it look like everything the stage was underwater.
From a technical point of view, it seems that Kipman’s visual representation was achieved with a green screen video capture that was shown to the public as an ‘outdoor’ texture that rotated facing each viewer, regardless of their position.
Up close, this technique would look very fake in VR, but they kept Kipman smart only far enough away from the audience that the flattening of their being was not really noticeable. Doing so also meant that the capture could be done with commodity hardware and software, while maintaining a high level of visual fidelity and capturing all elements of Kipman’s real-life mannerisms.
As Kipman spoke, the area above and around him slowly filled with schools of fish and even a huge whale shark that glided over him as he made his presentation. At one point, the audience saw a pop-up allowing them to select a fish that would swim towards the stage and join the other schools in their rounds. This was the first interactive element of the virtual reality lecture, but a more interesting interaction was yet to come (more on that later).
As Kipman spoke, a large screen behind him highlighted his points with photos and video images, and occasionally he disappeared to give the center of the stage to part of the presentation video.