How we creatively engaged an audience in a 3D metaverse pilot
18
Partners participated
Marketing & Events
The Mission
As the pandemic raged on and countless events moved online, we saw a need for more creative and interactive online engagement strategies. We took our rebranding exercise as an opportunity to run an innovative event for our partners, exploring the use of customised virtual spaces that would intrigue our guests and achieve our goals.
Our Brain Juice Approach
Our team’s goal was to hold a special virtual event for our partners through which we could thank them for being with us on our journey as well as introduce to them the new Brain Juice Collective. We thought deeply about how we wanted each guest to feel, think, do and behave. Once we were clear about the experience we wanted to create, we then looked into the event programme and infrastructure we needed to make it happen.
Some of the virtual space platforms available are:
- Mozilla Hubs is a virtual collaboration platform that runs on your browser. With Hubs you can create your own avatar-driven, 3D spaces with a single click. You can then invite others to join using a URL. Customisation requires a bit of getting used to but you’ll get the hang of it.
- Kumospace is an immersive, web-based group video chat tool. It combines the fun and creativity of video games with the simplicity of video chat, transforming conversations into experiences.
- Virbela is a virtual world platform built specifically to solve the challenges of remote collaboration. Meet, host events, hold classes, and service your entire remote workforce all in an immersive and engaging 3D world.
- Teamflow is your all-in-one virtual office where teams can collaborate, meet, brainstorm, and hang out.
- Kosy is a virtual office for companies to be more connected, social, and productive where teammates can work, play, network, and collaborate together.
- Remo is a video-first virtual workspace for remote teams that fosters real-time collaboration and strengthens company culture.
For our partner event, we used Mozilla Hubs.
Our Role
Our Impact
18 partners (across 3 slots) participated in our partner event. Overall, the participants really enjoyed the virtual experience. Here’s some of the feedback we received:
- "The virtual tour is a great display of BJC's innovation!" — Participant from a renowned university
- "It was magical. So creative and I loved being part of it!" — Participant from a renowned university
- "It was so fun, we might just use this for our upcoming team planning session!" — Participant from a government agency
- "Wow, I did not expect to be a talking fox on a Thursday night. Thank you for creating that lovely memory lane section!" — Participant from a technology giant
- "Thank you so much for arranging an awesome experience! It was wonderful." — Participant from the technology and creative industries
Our Partner Event: Meet The New Brain Juice
To make it more flexible for our partners, we had 3 sessions. Not only did the small intimate groups make each session more manageable with the speed and capacity limitations of Mozilla Hubs, it also made our partners’ experience more meaningful as we were able to design the virtual space specially for them. Having multiple sessions also meant that we could keep learning and improving as we went along.
We started the event on Zoom. We had some trivia where our partners got a chance to win prizes that represented our love for creative expression and fun:
- Playtronica Playtron Device
- Playtronica TouchMe Device
- LEGO Classic Creative Brick Box
- Children’s Book Set
- Singaporean Dream Card Game
We then proceeded to our immersive gallery which was created in Mozilla Hubs. This virtual gallery had different areas featuring our new graphics and website, our new online learning platform — Venture into Good and a special memory lane area for our partners. This memory lane added a personal touch as we created dedicated areas that featured milestone projects and events relevant to each partner.
Our Takeaways
- Customisation is key but be smart about it. Mozilla Hubs already provides a lot of 3D scene options. If you want to customise your own space, you can use Spoke. Spoke is an online 3D scene editor developed by the Mozilla Mixed Reality team. With Spoke, you can build environments using 3D models, architecture kit pieces, lights, images, videos, and more. Once your scene is ready, you can upload it to Hubs, or export it as a glTF 3D model. Basic knowledge of 3D is very useful in customising scenes in Spoke. For our space, we didn’t want to create anything from scratch so apart from adding our own content into the space, we changed the colours of certain assets to fit our brand identity and scattered “walnuts” around for a fun scavenger hunt that reminded guests about our signature Walnut Wednesday video series. This was enough to make it our own!
- When introducing something new, start with familiarity. Since this was a new platform for our partners, we started the event on a familiar platform – Zoom. Here, we shared what to expect, walked them through the 3D space and taught them how to navigate through it. This helped to prevent any unpleasant shocks once they joined us in the 3D virtual space.
- Put the user at the centre of your design. Thinking about the user experience within the 3D space was very important when we designed it. For example, placing the assets (graphics and videos) on the walls was not enough. We added text labels on the relevant "walls" so that the user could easily navigate.
- Everyone wants to have fun! Adding a trivia segment made the entire event a lot more interactive and surprisingly educational. We included questions about Brain Juice, a segment on guessing the personalities behind famous quotes that resonated with us and general trivia around the importance of social impact in business and innovation. This allowed us to get our messages across in a light-hearted and memorable way.
- Make it seamless with technology. We know how busy our partners can be. To make the entire experience as seamless as possible, we used various applications. For registration, we created the available slots via Calendly and embedded them directly in the invitation email. They then received an automated email confirmation as well as the Zoom meeting details in their calendar. When it came to the quiz, we had a QR code on the screen that they could scan to join the game as well as a link in the chat to click in case they were using a mobile device. Finally, for the 3D space itself, we used Hubs which is web-based so that they wouldn't need to download any additional application to participate. We also had multiple hosts follow the guests around in the space so we could help to troubleshoot or guide them if needed.
