There are many ways to host events of all shapes and sizes in Spatial. Spatial is great for both internal and external every day meetings, but we have gotten a lot of questions about how to host a wide variety of special events. This article is by no means an exhaustive list of ways to host events but may be helpful in thinking outside the box while keeping our technical limitations in mind.
First things first:
- Spatial can host up a maximum of 500 people per event if you are a Spatial+ user. 50 max for free.
- You can have as many rooms as you would like operating simultaneously.
- Make sure you share the Spatial link before the meeting only with the people you want to join.
- Ensure participants have made their Spatial account and avatars beforehand.
Scenario 1:
Happy Hour or Presentation
- Pretty simple to execute if kept to 20-30 people max.
- You could have multiple rooms with different themes or implement a room schedule to mix up the groups so people can talk and mingle. Utilize Portals to jump from space to space!
- Utilize Host Tools to maintain control over the room, its guests, and its content
- Enable Spatial Audio Falloff to facilitate smaller conversations. Turn it off when you're ready to group everyone back together.
- Have a plan- someone clearly leading or guiding the conversation makes a big difference.
- Great way to host activities such as workshops or brainstorming sessions.
- Implement thumbs ups, hand raising, or the passing of a baton 3D model if you want to make sure people are following along or to avoid interruption.
- Screen share or bring in models for games. Use the search feature to bring up easy content
- i.e. Wine glasses, scribble hangman, screen-share codenames or Jackbox games
- If more people need to watch a presentation, simply have someone on the web app screen share out to another conferencing service.
Scenario 2:
Poster Session or Speaker Series
- Designate a room per poster and allow people to travel between them freely. You could designate a handful of poster presenters per hour blocks.
- You could also spread posters (or even artwork) around a single room and enable people to explore them, or separate into rooms by topic.
- If people are speaking for extended lengths of time, not just a quick introduction, we recommend giving them their own room to design an experience around.
- Have each room designed by the speaker in advance and let people sign up to join them in the room. If more people want to attend than can fit, delegate them to watching via a livestream. (Great way to create urgency around attending an event! Limited spots!)
Scenario 3:
Panel or Town Hall Meeting
- Panel? In this case you may only want those talking to be in Spatial as avatars. The way you want to handle the remainder of the participants depends on the size of the group joining. You can have them join in headset as avatars, the web app, or broadcast your screen via another conferencing or livestream service that supports screen share.
- Clarification: If you expect there to be a large number joining to watch, designate a person as the moderator to join via the web app and share his/her screen’s window of Spatial to a video conferencing server that is designed to host larger audiences.
- The moderator can then collect questions during the meeting or presentation to lead the Q/A at the end
Scenario 4:
Conference with "Booths"
- Assuming these are totally virtual booths, you could pretend each Spatial room is a booth, add your marketing materials, and have your reps in the space ready to go. It is rare that at an event with lots to see anyone would be staying in a given room for too long, or even seeing them all, which would help keep numbers below 30.
- You could send out a list or map and attach links to rooms people can visit or even create designated schedules.