The time for the big reveal has come. You know that I’ve been very busy the last few months with a project I was working on. Finally, I can tell you what I was working on: a cool platform for VR concerts that you will be able to join on January, 10th!

VRROOM

I started collaborating with the company VRROOM in 2019, where together with the CEO Louis Cacciuttolo I investigated how to produce VR events and shows. In these 3 years, lots of things happened: the company has grown a lot and the team I’m part of has been able to create amazing experiences like the virtual versions of Venice Film Festival and SXSW, the Unite 2022 event together with Unity, and two VR concerts with Jean Michel Jarre that won a lot of awards.

All these years we always wondered if it could be a good idea to create a platform of our own to offer this kind of events, so that to be able to truly deliver the experiences we had in mind, without having to shoehorn all the production of an event into other platforms that were made for other purposes. The conditions have never been ideal to do that, until in 2022, also thanks to the metaverse hype (thanks Zuck), some stars aligned (starting from the “money star”, the brightest of them all), and we managed to start that project. Incredibly enough, notwithstanding the fact I’m coordinating the dev team, we succeeded in finishing the first stage of production and arriving at an alpha we are satisfied enough, and we are going to launch it with an amazing concert.

Just to be clear: we still love the other platforms and we still plan to do projects within them. I’m personally all for openness and collaborations: we used VRChat for many years and I think it’s an amazing platform. I invite you all to check out the incredible worlds that the community has been able to build there. But now we have also our toy to play with.

The VRROOM platform

The company is called VRROOM and the platform is called VRROOM, too. “VRROOM” is a bit like “metaverse”, it has millions of meanings. Feel free to use VRROOM to substitute whatever word that doesn’t come to your mind. Anyway, to make things clearer, sometimes I specify directly “The VRROOM platform” or I use the codename we used internally “VRROOM World” to disambiguate when I’m talking about the new platform.

The VRROOM platform has been made specifically to address virtual events, concerts, and liveshows. We are not interested in creating a new VRChat or Horizon Worlds, but we aim at offering something cool for one specific purpose. The masterplan is that if in the future you think about creating a VR concert or going to see one, VRROOM is the first platform that comes to your mind.

I can’t spoil much about the features for now. Currently, we are in alpha, and so we have started by implementing the basic features of every social VR application: multiplayer, avateering, objects interactions, tutorials… but we also already started working on features more specific to live events, like events scheduling and management. We have a roadmap of upcoming functionalities we are going to implement in the upcoming months, and those are going to transform our platform into something very cool for virtual shows. We are launching an alpha also because we want to listen to the feedback of the community, and hopefully, be able to develop this project together with you all.

I can talk about some foundational values we have, though. We are crazy and fun people that work very seriously, and we worked on this to the best of our possibilities. 6 Months ago, there wasn’t even a single line of code written. Now we have already a working alpha, with the project being developed fast but without accumulating too much technical debt… so we are doing things in the right way. We want to promote privacy, safety, inclusion, and accessibility and we already started to implement a part of this in our alpha. We don’t want to use these words just as buzzwords to promote ourselves, but we strongly believe in them, so we partnered with an established institution like XRSI to help us in carrying on these values. And to promote openness, we are trying to make our platform compatible with most devices that we can.

We’re trying to do things in the best way possible: this doesn’t mean we won’t make errors (we have already done a lot), but we will do our best to solve them whenever there will be some. And for this purpose, all your feedback will be very valuable.

The Big Crash

Our alpha launch will happen on January, 10th at 8pm CET (7pm UTC, 11am PT) with a cool VR concert created by us. The launch concert will feature four emerging French artists: Web7, Le Juiice, Maxence, and our beloved virtual DJ m1n0t0r for the afterparty. I promise you that it won’t be a traditional concert: forget about a stage and a place for the audience… we don’t want to replicate in VR the same events that happen in real life. VR is the place of the impossible, so we want to show there something that is unique and different from a real-life event. I know you probably have no idea who the artists are, but believe me, it’s going to be fun. And I’m sure you will love some of the little surprises we embedded inside (spoiler: don’t forget to use the integrated smartphone!)

One of the cool things is that the event will have some live features, so it won’t be all pre-recorded. We are very committed to working with live events in XR, and in this concert, you can already see something of our work.

I call the event “The Big Crash” because I know the app will crash for some of you. It’s an alpha, so if it doesn’t crash, it’s not fun. It will also have bugs and things you may not like, I know it. But I can promise you that no headset of ours has exploded while testing the application, so you should be safer than using Palmer Luckey’s SAO headset. BTW if you have some malfunctioning, close the app, reopen it, and you should be fine.

And if you could send us some logs or bug reports, that would be very much appreciated. To transform a bad event into a good one, I’m happy to offer a SteamVR gift card to the first user that sends to me a crash report on the launch day!

Where to get VRROOM?

VRROOM is in closed alpha on Steam, and in open alpha on Pico, Quest App Lab (we are also publishing on SideQuest), and Itch.io. If you want to get it on Steam (where this is our page), contact us on Discord and we will be happy to provide you with an Alpha key. An alternative for using PCVR is getting our executable directly from Itch.io. For App Lab, you can download it at this link, while with Pico, you can wishlist it from the “Coming Soon” page of the Pico Store.

You can start downloading the app and creating an account so that you can join the event more easily on the 10th. On the 10th at 8pm CET a button will appear that will let you join the performance. After the 10th we will periodically host events, some bigger and others smaller, to keep the platform alive.

Please register on our website https://vrroom.world to have further info about it and to have reminders about the concert date. If you want a Steam key or you need assistance to attend the event, feel free to reach out to our team on Discord.

What if I’ve not a VR headset?

If you don’t have access to a VR headset that day, we’ve got you covered! You can still enjoy the Youtube stream of the event from here:

Where to have a preview?

The launch event is in just one week, but if you are already too eager to have a taste of VRROOM, you can do that these days at CES! You can meet some people from our team and have a short demo of our platform at:

• CES Unveiled: EP-219
• CES Show: 61211 Venetian Expo G at the Region Occitanie Pavillion

I’m unluckily not there because I have to support the team for the launch, but if you are at CES, please go visit my colleagues!

Post Scriptum – Post Mortem

The development of this platform has been the toughest professional work in all my eight years in virtual reality. Developing such a system is incredibly hard from all points of view, and all the team has made a huge effort to arrive at this point. If you are interested, after the launch, I can write here on this blog a post mortem about the lessons learned… let me know what you think about this idea!

See you on the 10^th, on VRROOM!

(Header image by VRROOM)