Virtual meetings. The Heidelberg-based digital agency imc marketing & consult laid on a special kind of event experience at Business Messe Mannheim in July. The event took place on the online meeting platform gather.town, which enables participants to attend as an avatar and meet others in small meetings or large conferences. The agency uses the platform to create customised virtual rooms for online events and incorporates the customer’s corporate design on request. The virtual trade fair centre of Business Messe Mannheim looked just like a physical trade fair. Visitors were able to make their way through virtual foyers to exhibition stands and chill-out lounges. “With gather.town you can get much closer to a real-world event than is possible with other web conferencing tools such as Zoom or Teams. And it is much more reasonably priced than a 3D solution, which is beyond the budget of many companies,” said Wolfgang Hentschel, imc’s managing director. The platform’s interactive concept is catching on fast. From this autumn, for example, gather.town is providing campus rooms for the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

Johanna Müdicken