Active Theory

Secret
Sky 2020

Technical Achievement / Nominee
Active Theory

Technical Achievement

A key theme throughout our work is bringing users together from all over the world to experience together. We dialed this up in Secret Sky, allowing thousands of users from all over the world to experience the festival concurrently together. - Active Theory Team
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Q: What influenced your chosen technical approach, and how did it go beyond past methods? A: We've worked with Porter Robinson across projects in the past including Virtual Self and Nurture. A key theme throughout our work is bringing users together from all over the world to experience together. In Nurture (https://nurtu.re/), users listen with a single partner from another location. We dialed this up in Secret Sky, allowing thousands of users from all over the world to experience the festival concurrently together.
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Q: Can you describe your project and the concept behind it? A: Secret Sky 2020 was a virtual music festival held on Saturday, May 5, 2020. The event live streamed 19 artists over 14 hours featuring Porter Robinson, Madeon, Jai Wolf, San Holo, and more. Over 750,000 attendees joined together in a digital auditorium to experience the event together.
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Q: What web technologies, tools, and resources did you use to develop this? A: The experience was created in WebGL, and was available on web devices via desktop, mobile and VR.

When did you experience a breakthrough or an "a-ha" moment during this project?

A key challenge in a multiplayer, interactive experience is designing and laying out the space. We needed to avoid making the space too big (as it could feel empty and spread out) but also too small (as it would feel crammed and lacking scale). For Secret Sky, our auditorium would instance, recreating itself over and over, as new users joined, ensuring there was always a good amount of users in the environment at once.

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Q: How did the final product meet or exceed your expectations? A: The turnout for Secret Sky was massive including 4 million live stream viewers, 200k+ event tweets, #2 trending on Twitter, and 750k+ auditorium attendees.

Q: Why is this an exciting time to create new digital experiences? How does your team fit into this? A: Secret Sky is part of our Dreamwave Platform portfolio. Using Dreamwave technology, we are able to seamlessly create exciting and engaging virtual events. Unlike many other digital events platforms, which focus on simple livestreaming and chat functions like Q&A, Dreamwave focuses on creative, custom events live Secret Sky.