Virtual events won't replace the venue — they'll double it

The venue is not dying. It is being copied.

The pandemic years produced a confident prediction: once people discovered they could attend a summit from their kitchen, the exhibition hall would empty. It did not happen. Halls in Riyadh, Dubai and Amman are booked out, and the exhibition calendar is as crowded as it has ever been.

What did happen is quieter and, for organisers, more valuable. The virtual layer did not replace the venue; it copied it. A conference now has a physical hall with 800 seats and a virtual hall with no seat limit. An exhibition has 200 stands on the floor and 200 branded booths online, some belonging to exhibitors who could never have shipped a stand across a border. The venue doubled.

The market data cited in Nplay's business brief describes exactly this. The virtual events market is forecast to expand from USD 79.36 billion in 2023 to USD 435.36 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 27.5 per cent, and the driver named in that research is not the death of the in-person event but the rise of hybrid formats: 80 per cent of event planners are now integrating virtual components into their strategies. A more conservative series in the same brief still puts growth at 18.8 per cent a year over 2024–2030. Either way, the virtual venue is becoming standard equipment.

What we learned running a fully virtual Arab summit

Our team helped build and run the first fully virtual Arab summit — an event held entirely inside a virtual expo centre. There was a reception hall, an auditorium for keynotes and panels, meeting rooms for the side conversations that are the real reason people attend summits, and a booth floor where exhibitors designed their own branded stands, loaded documents and films onto the booth screens and staffed them with live chat. Attendees joined as avatars from wherever they were, in a web browser, with nothing to install.

Three lessons came out of it and they now shape everything we build for events.

Design it as a venue. The events that fail online are websites with a 3D skin. The ones that work have a floor plan, sightlines, a route from the entrance to the auditorium, and somewhere to loiter. People behave in a virtual hall the way they behave in a real one: they look for the coffee.

Give the exhibitor a reason. Exhibitors paid for booths because they could see who visited, for how long, and what they downloaded. Without that dashboard a virtual booth is a brochure. With it, it is a lead machine that works in every time zone.

You can read the full account in our virtual summit case study. The third lesson deserves its own section, because it is about what most organisers miss.

The three layers of a hybrid event — and the one everyone skips

When organisers say “hybrid” they usually mean two things: the physical venue and a live stream of the main stage. That is a broadcast, not a second venue. The people watching cannot meet each other, cannot visit a stand, cannot ask a question at the booth. They are an audience, not attendees.

The third layer is the 3D venue itself — the halls, booths and meeting rooms that the remote attendee can walk through as an avatar, with the live stream playing inside its auditorium. This is the layer that doubles the venue rather than merely televising it, and it is the one most organisers skip because until recently it was expensive to build and awkward to attend.

The three layers do different jobs:

• Physical venue — the stage, the handshake, the dinner. Irreplaceable and capacity-limited.
• Live stream — reach. Anyone, anywhere, watching the main stage; pay-per-view, subscription or free.
• 3D virtual venue — participation. Booths, networking, side meetings and sponsorship for people who are not in the hall.

A well-run hybrid event uses all three and lets an attendee move between them: watch the keynote on the stream, walk to a booth in the 3D venue, book a meeting for the physical day. That is the design target for our own platforms.

How Nexus, FrontRow and Live divide the work

We are building three products for these three layers, and we should be clear that all three are in development rather than on the shelf. They grow directly out of the summit and out of years of live-broadcast work.

Nplay Nexus is the virtual exhibition and convention platform: a 3D venue with a main hall, an auditorium, meeting rooms and a booth floor, navigated in a browser with a customisable avatar. Exhibitors reserve and design booths from an interactive map; speakers run live sessions in the auditorium; a social hall with chat “bubbles” handles the corridor conversations; and every exhibitor and speaker gets a dashboard of who visited, who attended and what was sold.

Nplay FrontRow handles the physical side: a 3D model of the real venue in which attendees walk the hall, check the sightline from a seat and book it, while organisers upload the venue, define seating and booths and go live. It exists because the physical venue is not going anywhere and deserves the same care as the virtual one.

Nplay Live is the streaming and video-on-demand layer: a desktop studio for the creator, a mobile app for the viewer, ticketing and a wallet, pay-per-view or subscription, built to carry a main stage to a very large concurrent audience. Our immersive broadcasting service covers the production side.

Together they are the second venue. Separately, each solves one layer for organisers who already have the other two.

Five things organisers get wrong the first time

Because we have made most of these mistakes ourselves, here is the list we now give every organiser before a hybrid event.

1. Treating the stream as the virtual event. A stream is reach. If remote attendees cannot visit a booth or meet someone, you have a broadcast with a registration form.
2. Building the 3D venue as a website. Menus and tiles are not a venue. Give people a floor plan and a route.
3. Selling virtual booths without a dashboard. Exhibitors renew when they can count leads. Make the analytics the headline of the booth package.
4. Ignoring time zones and language. A Gulf summit attracts attendees from Jakarta to Casablanca. Sessions need on-demand replays, and the venue needs Arabic and English from the first screen.
5. Requiring a headset. The virtual venue must run in a browser and on a phone. A headset is a bonus for the few, not a barrier for the many.

None of these is a technology problem. They are design decisions, and they are why we prefer to be involved before the floor plan is drawn rather than after the platform is chosen. If you are planning a large gathering in Saudi Arabia or Jordan next season, the cheapest time to talk to us is now.