Sergey Tokarev’s ROOSH celebrated New Year’s Eve in the metaverse

In Ukraine because of the war, many employees had to flee the country and settle in different parts of the world. And during the winter festive time, they barely had any desire to celebrate. However, companies have to hold meetings, make plans, and discuss the results of the year. Keeping this in mind, Sergey Tokarev‘s IT company Roosh decided to hold all the company meetings in the metaverse.

The PartySpace platform allows one to choose among different venues to hold a meeting. The standard model of a venue can be later customized and refined to make it look cozier: you can adjust logos, slogans, or labels to the walls, visualize some elements of company reports, etc.

The Synchro Day, a special event traditional for Sergey Tokarev‘s colleagues, lasted three hours. To keep people’s attention during all this time, they should have prepared thoroughly. A day before the event, metaverse platform employees sent guides to the event participants and held rehearsals with speakers. For Synchro Day, the company prefers to involve its team instead of professional event-makers. Just like at regular offline meetings, you need to prepare a script and think about possible challenges. “The peculiarity of holding an event in the metaverse is that the host should explain and remind things that are not relevant for offline events. They need help with moving through space, communicating, help speakers on how to use functional part of the metaverse,” says Oleksandra Borodina, the company’s creative communications director. Apart from that, there can happen specific issues that we do not encounter in real life, for instance, a speaker may unexpectedly “freeze” if there is no Internet connection.

This is the second time that Roosh organizes a meeting for its employees in the metaverse. Six months ago, the company turned two years old. For the birthday party, the agency Gather created a virtual ship. The developers made a big discount for the company as they support Ukraine and its enterprises – for the whole bundle of work, which would otherwise cost 12,000 USD, Gather asked barely 100 USD.

The metaverse is not difficult, even those who have never heard of it can master it within half an hour. Movement, mechanics, and interaction with objects and other avatars come naturally. It is also easy to create your avatar – on some platforms, for example, PartySpace, you simply need to upload a photo, on other platforms, there is a special avatar designer panel.

For Roman Remeev, head sommelier of Good Wine, Roosh’s birthday was the first experience of performing in the metaverse. “The most difficult thing was to understand how to entertain others,” says Remeev. “Will it be interesting to people? Or will I be like a background radio, rather annoying so they might want to turn me off?” However, quite quickly he noticed that the audience listened to him and that people were interested, and it made him more relaxed.

So far, all the event participants liked the communication in the metaverse. Of course, it cannot replace usual offline meetings but it creates the effect of presence and communication with friends as much as it is possible in current circumstances.

*Note: Roosh is a Ukrainian IT company specializing in machine learning and artificial intelligence projects. It was founded by Sergey Tokarev in 2021. Today, Roosh includes the venture studio Pawa, the Roosh Ventures fund, the community building non-commercial platform AI HOUSE, SET University, the well-known startup Reface, and others.