Fast Company Innovation Garden

We worked with Fast Company to bring to life a virtual world for the 2020 Innovation Festival that brings back the serendipity of meeting new people, running into old friends and sharing ideas and insights at in-person conferences. Attendees enter the Innovation Garden and encounter a green space framed by lush flora and fauna, with a simple cityscape in the background. The attendee can wander through the garden, striking up conversations with fellow attendees they encounter nearby. These conversations are made possible by proximity-aware audio technology that notices when avatars are near each other, and activates their audio so they can interact. Attendees can share their contact details by hovering over each other’s avatars and clicking “connect”. Each attendee can also click on their contact list button to see who they’re connected to. Around the Innovation Garden, attendees will notice planted and growing trees. These trees represent ideas that attendees have seeded. And like social media, where you can like or react to a post, attendees will have the opportunity to amplify their colleagues’ thinking by ‘watering’ their ideas. This allows interesting ideas to gain momentum throughout the conference, and are visualized to attendees as growing trees.