You know what’s so not fun? When you spend weeks being super excited about something and telling all your friends about it and then the actual day of the thing comes and you go to its homepage — because hello pandemic so it’s not like we’re actually going anywhere and of course this thing is virtual XP, duh — and when you get there, WHAT?! You’re not sure where to go or what to do because there’s literally more than 20 navigation items to choose from (see below) with completely unhelpful category names like “channel 1” and “channel 5.” And then when you try to enter the much-touted extended reality version of this thing it asks you to create more logins and passwords and then friend certain hosts and get approvals and set up news IDs and on and on…
Okay, deep breath, thank you for bearing with us through our big Eeyore meltdown moment. We are, of course, talking about SXSW. Now that we’ve rage-written our initial reaction to the set-up — please see image above for what not to do with a navigation menu — we will say that once you get past the messiness of the homepage and dive into the offerings, it’s actually pretty cool.
We love that there’s a one-click registration for individual events and the panels and fireside chats we saw were both interesting from a programming perspective and pretty flawless from a production standpoint. It was particularly cool that if your attention started to wander during a session (hey, it happens to the best of us!) a picture-in-picture video player would continue to stream the content as you browsed other parts of the Swapcard platform. The chat and Q&A functionality also worked well and while the networking was certainly not what it was in previous years — as noted last week, nothing in IDL can truly replace those IRL serendipitous moments — we appreciated the AI-powered match suggestions and the ease with which you could schedule meetups with connections.
And if you had the technical skills and hardware to make it there, virtual Austin looked pretty dang awesome. The venue was custom-built for SXSW inside of VRChat, the popular social virtual reality platform that was explored a bit in Still Holding Issue #52. Designers went above-and-beyond to create small surprises within the immersive venue, like axe throwing, go karts, beer pong, an NFT gallery, floating sculptures and a motion-captured jazz performance by tuba player Theon Cross.
We’re super curious about what SXSW has planned for 2022 — particularly given its new ownership structure — and we’ll keep you posted.
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