It was all just supposed to be a one-time thing. When Burning Man got canceled because of covid-19 in 2020, a number of attendees banded together to re-create the festival on the social VR platform Altspace. That virtual Burning Man experience not only attracted around 13,000 visitors, but also accolades from the Producers Guild of America.
The success led to the decision to keep the digital version of Burning Man going even when the real-life festival returned in 2021. BRCvr, named after the festival’s temporary Black Rock City settlement, became a recurring Burning Man outpost in VR. There were virtual hangouts, replicas of many of the festival’s most notable structures. That included a digital version of The Man — the large wooden structure at the center of Burning Man that is set ablaze in the Utah desert every year.
Image: BRCvr
Then, BRCvr got burned itself. As part of a broader shift away from consumer VR, Microsoft shut down Altspace in early 2023. That effectively pulled the plug on the virtual Burning Man too. “When Altspace shut down, we were a little bit lost in the woods,” says Athena Demos, CEO of Big Rock Creative, the company behind BRCvr.
Eager to find a replacement, Demos and BRCvr cofounder Doug Jacobson toured over 40 social VR platforms, only to walk away disappointed time and again. “We realized: There’s no platform out there that has all the [features] we need,” Jacobson recalls, like the ability to upload huge amounts of content. That’s why the BRCvr team went to work building their own social VR app from scratch. The BurnerSphere, as it is now called, is being released in beta for both VR headsets and desktop PCs in time for next week’s Burning Man festival.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Burning Man isn’t everyone’s thing. Personally, I can imagine much more pleasant ways to spend the last week of August than having desert sand stuck in my teeth (or worse: my feet stuck in mud) while some billionaire trips out on ketamine in the tent next door.
Image: BRCvr
However, Burning Man is also arguably one of the largest and longest-running annual tech-adjacent gatherings in the world. That even this community struggled to find a home in VR, and ultimately decided to go its own way, also tells you a lot about the friction that still exists in this medium, and the challenges companies need to overcome to have people buy into their vision of the metaverse.
Riding on a mutant vehicle
When you launch the BurnerSphere app on your Meta Quest headset, you’ll find yourself on a digital replica of Gate Road, the desert road leading to the festival. From there, you can watch a short VR documentary of immersive footage shot at Burning Man events in years past, or enter the festival itself through a series of interconnected portals.
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