1 year of lockdown 150 unique event experiences in XR

This year has been a really exciting year as an unconventional event organizer, never I was able to get so many people go all-in on digital transformation as this year, next to never I have travelled less in a year and never have lost so many assignments and savings in a year. A contradiction for many event organizers like me, remembering event organizing as a purely physical thing, with some aftermovies and interesting line-up speakers and performers to remember the whole experience to being forced to let go of all that made us thrive: bringing people together in physical experiences.

My rollercoasterride

From the beginning of the year, my year was wrecked already, loosing over a year of work assignments from lost keynote speeches on events in India, China, Dubai and many national speaking gigs, towards helping out corporates in 4-month innovation programs, and vocational school associations setting up 'Sterk Techniek Onderwijs'. I out of a sudden ended up having 6 months of nearly zero income, after having my best year as an entrepreneur so far in my 5th year of being an independent contractor.

I lost 50% of all my savings trying to re-invent myself, making wrong quick decisions like investing in stocks, before the lockdown kicked-in towards trying to keep on hosting hackathons and in-person events, over 15 different clients had to cancel their agreements, and I had no leg to stand as a freelancer with no pre-payments in my contracts... we had to give up on Young Impact Day FT Tech Olympics on which my dear colleagues Jesse van Doren and Marco Kool have worked on for 1.5 years to empower 10.000 people to become changemakers in June 2020. It was a depressing Q1 and Q2 for us as tech and innovation event organizers and often booked keynote speakers.

A start of a new beginning

Since giving my first keynote in February as an avatar in VR I started collaborating with the XR communities out there. Makers, designers, event organizers, artists, all of them are super awesome people, blending their creative skills into producing everlasting memorial experiences. I remember the first assignments I had again back in March, giving ZOOM trainings for hybrid events, before I knew it I was going to get in XR so deep that I was already thinking, these ZOOM Tegenlicht sessions are fun, but having a physical environment on a zoom camera is actually the least fun. As most environments in the real world are actually so boring that doing ZOOM sessions is even more fun with everyone at home when people went nuts on creating the most beautiful backgrounds and started using AR filters.

Finding back purpose

I realized that I had to make events again the epic experience leveraging all the best digital tools out there, with AR and VR at the start and end of every experience, to make every instance unique. But all of you know updating your event format every year you can only change parts of its context and content or you create a new festival and you are organizing for a new audience every year from scratch. Luckily enough after the hype of VR and AR in 2012, I got involved into the scene of XR by joining the Burning Man Multiverse team in July 2020.

All of us seeing a transformation in using no videoconferencing tools before 2020 to all becoming sick of them from March to July 2020. I am really glad I had no longer had to offer ZOOM training sessions "to survive" but was already designing unique blended experiences for organizations like ICTU, was already able to train dozens of people in using XR for their business, made essential connections to get the first TEDx in VR kickstarted between BEEMUP and TEDxNijmegen and started hosting and testing new VR platforms every single day and found myself a sense of purpose again in bringing people together on unique ways and learning while doing which platform for what purpose made sense.

I'm really glad that I got supported by Ronald van den Hoff to turn myself into a digital twin to get invited on TEDxVR as a speaker.

Now returning the favour by helping their business Seats2meet in turning into a hybrid meeting and event space in VR, after making a digital twin of their venue with 360Fabriek and train and develop their staff with hosting their own VR co-working and events.

I'm also really glad I met Dana-Maria Faneker - whom I have worked with ever since she helped me as a moderator on my first VR speaking gig in February on Educators in VR.

We have now spoken on 10 universities as guest lecturers, coached secondary schools and primary schools to get started with XR and now we co-host every week around 2-3 events with to guide organizations in leveraging their business opportunities of XR. Getting a lot of press coverage, and even being asked as a speaker in Pakistan last November to represent my vision on our bright future leveraging XR as a globe to overcome 'our bordered real world'.

We partnered up with Michiel Grootkamp from EmagineBV to even get students happily engaged in education again and get a glimpse of learning tech skills in now time leveraging VR. We are now capable of creating digital twins of assets, content and people and work closely together with current social VR platform builders from California towards Finland and Berlin to offer custom made mass event platforms that can create more productive working environments, more engaging exhibitions and super interactive life-like digital festivals.

Today Dana-Maria and our team of XR lovers have brought over 50.000 people together in XR, by giving them tools, inviting them over as guests for events, enabling them to host their own event or speak on an event in VR and train plenty of organizations to get hands-on skills into getting further in XR. From therapists to trainers/teachers, to governments, to celebrities, to the biggest art festival curators. We now have seen successful XR products and service get started in almost every industry, sometimes with just a 15 minutes demo on ZOOM screen sharing to make that possible, sometimes by just sharing a WEBVR link of an art exhibition that turned out to have encouraged dozens of students to finish their studies with VR presentations and expo's themselves ;)

I am happy to end this year as busy as I have ended last year and I am thrilled to have the pleasure to work with Rijkswaterstaat NOVA, Stichting DoeJeMee, Seats2meet Utrecht, Avans Hogeschool, HKU, WdKA, RIC, ICTU, MinJenV, Superwomanacademy, BridgeBond NL, Burning Man Metaburn, Venice Biennale, 360Fabriek, BLANX, CreativeHubs/postelOntwerpen, Your VR connector, Gemeente Almere, Gemeente Rotterdam, Port of Rotterdam (FFF), Stichting Bibliotheken Eemland, Haenen's Inspratie, HAN, By Whyte, STUDIO WHY, XIFEO, D66 Midden Nederland, JongOndernemen, Nutshell conferences and Breman Academy. To many more to come!

Wishing you some wonderful Christmas days and a beautiful get together in XR in 2021!

Nick van Breda