WOLF – The World’s Online Festival – continues its progress as a metaverse offering with the upcoming launch of its virtual reality (VR) feature on the Oculus Quest 2’s app store, launching later this year.
WOLF’s VR app will allow users to explore immersive 3D digital festival venues, checking out the acts on stage and wandering among the crowds within dazzling virtual environment
The VR app takes the 3D cinematic venues that WOLF created in early 2021 with its Showreel feature, and allows users to not just watch the festival shows live and recorded, but actually to enter the festival and ‘be’ there as their avatar.
The metaverse is the next big phase in our online lives. It’s a 3D immersive environment driven by VR that is shared by multiple users, in which participants can interact with each other via avatars in ‘spaces’. This merging of the physical and digital world is opening up significant opportunities for leading online entertainment and social media companies to capitalise on new revenue streams.
According to market analysis by Bloomberg, the global metaverse revenue opportunity could approach $800 billion by 2024 and the opportunities in live entertainment and social media could account for $200 billion of that.
We have already built a unique mobile experience that allows people to participate and enjoy a festival world. Our unique patent-pending technology allows us to bridge the gap between 2D and 3D worlds and by the end of 2022, we will have built further game-changing technology that enables our brand to blend real world festivals into the metaverse. WOLF is the only brand that is layering entertainment onto an already engaged online chat community. Typically, we’re seeing apps layer community into entertainment – a significantly more challenging brief because users have come there to listen to music, rather than to chat to others. Coming to chat and then discovering loads of amazing entertainment in WOLF, on the other hand, feels like a wonderful bonus.
The ability to bring live events into 3D virtual worlds presents an exciting opportunity for WOLF as we look at ways to elevate our users’ experiences and offer them an exciting, immersive metaverse opportunity.
A virtual world provides performers with an unparalleled degree of flexibility to explore and communicate virtually with fans. Creating virtual music, comedy, chat show gigs and the adoption of this concept is expected to increase revenue growth of this segment. Travis Scott’s Fortnite performance was a famous early example and a demonstration of where WOLF is headed.
We have already started our transition into this new world. Last year, we brought the virtual world experience to social audio with our Showreel feature, a creative blend of audio and visual content; transforming listen-only content into 3D cinematic visual events.
Showreel offers audio content creators a virtual space to share their art in new ways providing them with the opportunity to capture and share their shows, outside of the app, across multiple other platforms such as YouTube. The virtual reality can be live streamed instantly as a video, or recorded for future playback and sharing. Virtual reality mini snippets or edited highlights packages can be editorially created, for the performers and producers to share on social media channels.
Created in-house by the team’s developers in Newcastle, the idea of Showreel is that everyone in the show – creator and audience – can be involved in a user generated interactive festival experience.
Gary Knight, WOLF CEO, says: “The metaverse is the biggest thing to happen for user experience and engagement and the possibilities are infinite. For us, Showreel is an introductory taster of what we can create in the future. Merging audio with 3D, cinematic visual events, gives our users a virtually shared space to entertain and connect with others in a virtual world. This is just the beginning.”