Fans will soon be able to step into a virtual Sansar comedy club and enjoy live stand-up shows by well-known comics such as YouTube star personality Steve Hofstetter – for a new event series called “Comedy Gladiators: a Virtual Comedy Experience.”

The live comedy showcase will allow fans to do everything in VR that they would do at a real-life comedy club
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Fans will soon be able to step into a virtual Sansar comedy club and enjoy live stand-up shows by well-known comics such as YouTube star personality Steve Hofstetter
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The live comedy showcase will, according to Sansar’s creators Linden Lab, allow fans to do everything in VR that they would do at a real-life comedy club: purchase tickets in advance, shop for custom merch and memorabilia, even order drinks.

“Fans can purchase tickets online via the Sansar Store, just as they would for a real-life event, and receive instant access to the virtual venue. Once there, they can purchase a wide range of items, including commemorative virtual t-shirts, beer mugs, and even physical copies of Steve’s most recent book, Ginger Kid,” according to their news release.

You can purchase tickets online via the Sansar Store
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Tickets went on sale for $9.99 for the first event in the series which was scheduled for Monday, December 10, at 7:30 PM PT, and featured stand-up and storytelling from Hofstetter alongside Ben Gleib (voice of Marshall in Ice Age: Continental Drift), Maz Jobrani (part of the “Axis of Evil” comedy group), Alonzo Bodden (winner of Last Comic Standing season 3), and Mary Lynn Rajskub (actress in Fox series 24).

Tickets went on sale for $9.99 for the first event in the series
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This idea itself is nothing new, of course. There are many companies out there trying to monetize on virtual live events such as concerts. AltspaceVR tried it as early as 2016, before they were acquired by Microsoft, claiming to be the first ones to host a live comedy event in VR (on a slight side note, any time anybody claims to be the first to do anything in VR they are almost guaranteed to be flooded by comments and clarifications from the Second Life community who will helpfully tell you how they’ve been doing that s**t since the 90s).

There are many companies out there trying to monetize on virtual live events such as concerts
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Sansar itself has been successfully exploring different in-world experiences, including an exclusive eshibit of Star Wars memorabilia and artwork from Burning Man in partnership with the Smithsonian, but these have mostly been free. Since launching Sansar in public beta last year, however, Linden Lab has made no bones about the fact that monetization is a core part of its plans for the platform, much like it has been for Second Life. This is therefore quite a big milestone for the company according to Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg.

Sansar has been successfully exploring different in-world experiences, including an exclusive eshibit of Star Wars memorabilia and artwork from Burning Man in partnership with the Smithsonian
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“By bringing these commercial opportunities into VR, Sansar is taking virtual events to a whole new level – enhancing and expanding on what’s possible in-person. We look at Comedy Gladiators as the first ripple in a larger wave – the first event of many more that bring entertainers into VR – and we’re thrilled that Steve shares this vision”

For entertainers like Hofstetter, the collaboration offers a chance to greatly expand their audience without compromising the intimate feel of a live performance:

“Every day, I get emails and DMs from fans who want to see a live show, but they live in parts of the world I’ll probably never tour in,” Hofstetter said. “VR allows those fans to not only see a live show, but feel like they’re part of a bigger community,” he says.

Sansar’s Avatar Broadcasting feature will enable the performers taking part in Comedy Gladiators to virtually broadcast their performances across an unlimited number of spaces in Sansar, reaching a wider audience than a physical event could ever allow and giving a lot more fans a chance to grab a front row seat.

By bringing these commercial opportunities into VR, Sansar is taking virtual events to a whole new level
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Sansar’s Avatar Broadcasting feature will enable the performers taking part in Comedy Gladiators to virtually broadcast their performances across an unlimited number of spaces
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Whether or not fans will keep coming back to spend their real-world cash on virtual shows and merchandise will really depend on the quality of experience. In terms of visuals, Sansar is probably the most advanced of the social VR platforms, but that often comes at a cost in terms of slow loading times and intensive demands on your GPU and CPU, so it will be interesting to see whether they manage to lure enough pundits to develop this as a scalable commercial avenue. I’d say that for $10 it’s worth a try, just for laughs.

This article was originally published on VRScout

Sansar To Host Live VR Comedy Series With YouTube Star Steve Hofstetter via @alicebonasio https://t.co/54OlwLk8Cs pic.twitter.com/3TgSfza2Ku

— VRScout (@VRScout) December 9, 2018

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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post A Virtual Comedy Experience appeared first on Tech Trends.

AltspaceVR wants to enable people to attend live events in virtual reality.

AltspaceVR's strategy is increasingly focusing on live events
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With mounting competition from platforms like Sansar and High Fidelity (both of which are in Beta at the moment but planning public releases for 2017), it seems like AltspaceVR’s strategy is increasingly focusing on live events as their unique selling proposition in the Social VR Space.

AltspaceVR held the first UK live comedy show in virtual reality, which marks a significant strategic move for the company as it tries to prove the case for enabling people to attend live events in virtual reality.

With mounting competition from platforms like Sansar and High Fidelity (both of which are in Beta at the moment but planning public releases for 2017), it seems like AltspaceVR’s strategy is increasingly focusing on live events as their unique selling proposition in the Social VR Space.

The strategy of building on geographical clusters makes sense in the context of trying to grow a social-based product
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But why hold such a milestone event in London if the company is still firmly based in Redwood City, CA? It’s actually part of their broader European expansion plan, explains Head of International Market Development Debby Shepard, who has just relocated from San Francisco to London to spearhead that.

With around 30 percent of their current base made up of European users, AltspaceVR hopes to significantly grow that by providing greater support and expanded programming. That strategy of building on geographical clusters makes sense in the context of trying to grow a social-based product, since we’re much more likely to engage with those sort of experiences if our friends are already on board.

The demand for live events in VR is driven by the same desire that people have to attend festivals, concerts, comedy clubs—the shared live experience of performer and audience
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Although the potential of using VR’s immersiveness to make live experiences available to larger audiences is certainly clear, it’s also quite obvious that it’s still very early days for this technology
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The live show featured two very well-known names in the vibrant comedy circuit, Ian Stone (ranked among the top ten stand-ups in Britain by The Independent and a member of the Comedy Store’s ‘Cutting Edge’ team) and Ben Norris (who apart from being the cousin of actor Martin Freeman, is a regular on popular UK television shows such as Mock the Week and Never Mind the Buzzcocks). I was told that attendance for such events ranges/has ranged up into the thousands, and an encore presentation should be available on Dec. 26 at 7 pm Pacific here.

AltspaceVR’s live event capture technology launched in November and can capture live events in full VR, so users can either watch a performance live or an encore after the event (or both). Previously they had tested some of this functionality in a partnership with SyFy for their show Halcyon, where they showed the first episode in VR and hosted a virtual reality international press junket on the platform. The benefits of that for a global audience are clear, as it transcends the need (and associated cost) of travel and lets them do so at a convenient time for them while keeping the social and interactive aspects you don’t get with simply watching a recorded show on TV.

“The demand for live events in VR is driven by the same desire that people have to attend festivals, concerts, comedy clubs—the shared live experience of performer and audience,” says Shepard. “VR uniquely brings the performer and audience into the same space, replicating the live performance experience. With AltspaceVR’s FrontRow, it’s now possible to deliver it to an unlimited number of people simultaneously from around the world.”

This FrontRow technology means that only a fraction of the attendees are visible in these images, explains Gerald Gottheil from AltspaceVR’s marketing team. The idea, presumably, is that no matter how many people sign up to participate in an event, you never get your view blocked by that annoying tall, hat-wearing person standing right in front of you.

Although the potential of using VR’s immersiveness to make live experiences available to larger audiences is certainly clear, it’s also quite obvious that it’s still very early days for this technology. For one, the AltspaceVR avatars still have that characteristic cartoon woodiness that have been a staple of such platforms since the ’90s. That, however, might soon be set to change, especially if they manage to plug into some of the bolder advances in personalized-avatar technology we’ve seen emerging in the space recently.

No matter how many people sign up to an event, you'll never get your view blocked by that tall, hat-wearing person standing right in front of you
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Another interesting aspect of this announcement was the way it overlapped the real and virtual worlds by offering audiences based in London the chance to gather in a physical space to watch a virtual reality performance together with their friends at Camden Square’s recently opened Virtually Reality space.

This represents a new concept that not only plugs into London’s  thriving VR start-up community to help bring their products to market, but also provides ordinary consumers with a physical and social space which invites them to experience and learn about VR and discover its possibilities through hands-on play.  Touting themselves as the “UK’s first virtual reality retail and experience space,” they started out as a stall on Portobello Road selling mobile VR headsets, and managed to capture the imagination of enough passers-by to fund their next move into its current trendy Camden base. It will be really interesting to see how many more such spaces start cropping up in major cities in 2017 as VR takes off.

This article originally appeared on UploadVR

Live comedy shows in @AltspaceVR are growing! https://t.co/S5gJiX7YaY via @alicebonasio #VR

— Upload (@UploadVR) December 23, 2016

Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to enhance brand strategy with immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Are VRlive Events Becoming a Thing? appeared first on Tech Trends.