Components

Planning an event is really really hard. Maybe that’s obvious to some people, but for Janel and I, planning the event around which our kickstarter project revolves resulted in a pattern of excited ideation, followed by fearful anticipation of the mountain of work needed to realise our ideas, then paring things back until they felt manageable, and then repeating the whole thing by having more ideas. The deeper we dug into the details, the more overwhelming things became, with details seeming impossible to decide on or resolve.

Here are a few things we discussed:

The event is strcutured around our VR experience, but what do people do while they’re waiting for their turn, or for their friends to finish up? This question led us to imagine a gallery space attached to the VR room, where people can hang out and enjoy the vibes. (Christina suggested it could be a party!)

But what should that space be? We boiled it down to music, food and drinks, art, and maybe a presentation by an artist we admire.

Food is tricky because if it’s more than just simple snacks then it becomes a cost, and if it’s just simple snacks then it’s not really a draw.

We had a lot of questions around drinks. Should we charge for them? Do we need a license for that? Can we do BYOB?

We love the idea of having art installations that are somehow related to our VR experience, but have no idea what that involves. What do you need to pay an artist to exhibit their work? Would they even want to be associated with two students doing some weird VR project?

Even the music and presentations present potential points of failure in terms of the techincal set up at the event.

Speaking of technical, we had a lengthy discussion about how guests would be fitted into the VR headset and start the experience. Does it happen outside the VR room, and then they take the headset off again and it is magically transported into the room, waiting for them? Do they have to figure out the adjustments on their own? Does someone walk into the room with them and help them get set up, then exit quickly?

I think I could watch dust forever.

Van Moof

Last month, Nike released a new digital ad targeted to women in the Arab world. It features different women athletes in the Middle East, including figure skater Zahra Lari from the United Arab Emirates; fencer Inès Boubakri from Tunisia and boxer Arifa Bseiso from Jordan.

For me, there was one scene, portrayed by actors, that struck home. As a young woman in a hijab skateboards along a street, stared down by a middle-age woman, the narrator asks, “What will they say about you?”