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COVID-19 forced many art and film festivals to go virtual in 2020. For VR this move was not entirely negative. Some festivals used the transition to online editions for setting up impressive showcases of their immersive sidekicks. Cinematic VR suddenly came into a position to represent branded festival locations like Cannes or Venice in online festivities. Expanded cinema is about to establish its very own festival j

In contrast to most large scale business and public events, this year’s IFA did actually offer a real-world event instead of going entirely online for pandemic related conditions. The IFA Special Edition took place on-site at the Berlin Messe fairground as well as in local electronic retail stores and on the internet as a digital broadcasting event. With this parallel presentation channelling the show became a

The annual conference on computer graphics SIGGRAPH had to go online in 2020 and mastered the challenge by offering an expanded edition with many insights, inspirations and imaginations on a well organized digital content hub. All established program channels of the real world show were represented by their digital twin section online. A great deal of the programs could be watched on-demand, either before or after th

Gamescom went entirely online this year. Most areas of the world’s most popular gaming event were maintained on the landing page of Gamescom Now. Gamescom Congress offered a mixture of videos on demand and live workshops on Zoom. Indie Arena Booth, Business Area and brand booths were transposed into an isometric platform for web browsers. The 4 days long video streaming stampede transformed the real-life event

Like so many business events in 2020, Devcom went completely digital in this year’s edition. The developer convention still precedes the Gamescom trade show, which also had to go digital this year. Unlike the years before, the convention was less attached to the main promotion event on the fairground, as the program depended less on physical presence in Cologne this time. Devcom expanded the digital offering fo

Console VR is mostly associated with PlayStation VR although there are many more relations between VR and consoles on the market. Sony’s biggest competitor Microsoft avoids VR on the Xbox but develops for Windows Mixed Reality. Nintendo tested the waters with cardboard toy system Labo VR for the Switch. Oculus established a console-like ecosystem for their standalone VR headset Quest. With the beginning of a ne

A Maze, the annual experimental festival of interactive arts in Berlin suffered quite some setbacks for the preparation of this year’s issue. First, a Kickstarter initiative had to make sure that the festival is financially viable. Then the pandemic forced the festival’s overarching event platform Berlin Gamesweek into cancellation. Therefore, A Maze went totally digital for this year’s edition R

The status of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo as North America’s most important game business event has been debated since the beginnings in 1995. But these discussions came to an end this year when the pandemic situation forced the cancellation of E3 for the first time. Some relevant big industry players already shifted their promotion strategies to the internet or they were going for their own event

Since the pandemic outbreak in early 2020, we have seen many cancellations of conventions, trade shows and marketing events. After some improvisations for setting up provisionary online replacements for these cancelled events, we now seem to have entered a ‘new normal’ of online conventions, marketing video streams and promotional webinars. Some of these trends may persist even in a post-pandemic future.