The WIF virtual conference was a two day event held for participants across the world which was held during a time when face to face interaction was not possible. The event featured multiple presentation theatres of different capacities where live talks were live streamed over Vimeo into the 3D world.

Visitors were invited to freely explore the many environments and spaces in the conference including market stalls where exhibitors presented their initiatives and held personal 1-1 voice and video calls with visitors. Throughout the spaces there were many voice pods visitors could enter to engage in voice conversations with other visitors in those pods.

Due to the popularity of the conference I was tasked with designing an api and architecture that would both scale to facilitate thousands of simultaneous visitors to the conference whilst not overloading the visitor computers. To do this visitors were split over multiple parallel instances which limited each space to around 100 visitors. In order to allow friends and colleagues to meet in the environment we allowed to visitors to teleport to each other. Voice pods were other areas where we would bring visitors together across the parallel instances.

As part of the inclusivity and global visitor base Wordly was used to provide live transcription and translation for all live video feeds at the conference. This enabled visitors from across the globe to view live subtitles in their chosen language.

Highlights

  • Scalable - multi-sharded architecture - scaling to thousands of visitors simultaneously interacting in 3D environments
  • Live streaming and Video on Demand
  • Live transcription and translated subtitles
  • Cross shard voice communication
  • Live chat, reminders and notifications to in world visitors
  • Web backend interface for exhibitors to communicate and have 1-1 video calls with visitors

Technologies used

  • ASP.NET Core (API, Websockets)
  • Azure Cloud (Web apps, Azure Signalr)
  • Unity 3D
  • Third party services: Azure Cloud, Wordly (live translation feed), Vimeo live streaming, Vimeo Video on Demand, Photon Cloud (game server for voice and synchronisation of visitor location in the virtual conference spaces)