Our group is supporting the School of Design at the Royal College of Art since 2020 with a number of Gather.town-based virtual environments which were used for multiple purposes. Gather.town is a commercial customizable virtual environment enabling dynamic video chats, dynamic movement along a 2D plane and serendipitous interactions. Gather was established in the Silicon Valley around late 2019/early 2020 and we early started experimenting with its early beta versions when looking for a ways to fight Zoom fatigue. We quickly found out that it provides a great alternative to physical show events during the COVID lockdown.
For Innovation Design Engineering (IDE), we created environments for
- IDE Meetups
- Superform 2021 online tutorials
- Superform 2021 Preview and Final Show
- IDE Industry Night 2021
We were also supporting other events which were partly modeled and visualized by external people.
In addition, we were providing the virtual Gather environments for
Our environments were build with Blender, modeled in 3D and then rendered in 2D. In addition, other software tools were used to combine these environments with, e.g., textures and additional background.