Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: The story behind the relaunch of Burning Man in VR, and a new AI video tool from the makers of Qai Qai.

How Burning Man VR rebuilt after Microsoft shut it down 

It was all just supposed to be a one-time thing. When Burning Man got canceled because of covid-19 in 2020, a number of attendees banded together to re-create the festival on the social VR platform Altspace. That virtual Burning Man experience not only attracted around 13,000 visitors, but also accolades from the Producers Guild of America.

The success led to the decision to keep the digital version of Burning Man going even when the real-life festival returned in 2021. BRCvr, named after the festival's temporary Black Rock City settlement, became a recurring Burning Man outpost in VR. There were virtual hangouts, replicas of many of the festival’s most famous art pieces, and of course a ceremonial burning of a digital version of The Man – the large wooden structure at the center of Burning Man that is set ablaze in the Utah desert every year.

Then, BRCvr got burned itself. As part of a broader shift away from consumer VR, Microsoft shut down Altspace in early 2023. That effectively pulled the plug on the virtual Burning Man too. "When Altspace shut down, we were a little bit lost in the woods," says Athena Demos, CEO of Big Rock Creative, the company behind BRCvr.

Eager to find a replacement, Demos and BRCvr cofounder Doug Jacobson toured over 40 social VR platforms, only to walk away disappointed time and again. “We realized: There’s no platform out there that has all the [features] we need,” Jacobson recalls, like the ability to upload huge amounts of content. That’s why the BRCvr team went to work building their own social VR app from scratch. The BurnerSphere, as it is now called, is being released in beta for both VR headsets and desktop PCs in time for next week’s Burning Man festival.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Burning Man isn’t everyone’s thing. Personally, I can imagine much more pleasant ways to spend the last week of August than having desert sand stuck in my teeth (or worse: my feet stuck in mud) while some billionaire trips out on ketamine in the tent next door.

However, Burning Man is also arguably one of the largest and longest-running annual tech-adjacent gatherings in the world. That even this community struggled to find a home in VR, and ultimately decided to go its own way, also tells you a lot about the friction that still exists in this medium, and the challenges companies need to overcome to have people buy into their vision of the metaverse.

Riding on a mutant vehicle

When you launch the BurnerSphere app on your Meta Quest headset, you’ll find yourself on a digital replica of Gate Road, the desert road leading to the festival. From there, you can watch a short VR documentary of immersive footage shot at Burning Man events in years past, or enter the festival itself through a series of interconnected portals.

Some of these portals unlock showcases for Burning Man art, complete with information about each artist. Others let you watch additional short immersive videos, or explore different camps and squares.

On a recent visit, I looked at The Man pre-burn up close, and climbed on one of those customized mutant vehicles that looked like a steampunk rocketship to take part in a nighttime ride-along. I also got to see how BRCvr blends digital artifacts with real-life immersive video: When I entered a tent, its interior got overlaid with 360-degree footage of people hanging out in the real-life version of that tent, making it seem like I was in the middle of the action.

The whole place was pretty deserted pre-festival, but is supposed to feature live broadcasts from the 2025 Burning Man next week. The BRCvr team will also capture additional immersive footage and Gaussian splats at the festival, with plans to add new content every other week and host regular events starting in September. “We wanted to combine social VR and a documentary together,” says Jacobson, who tells me that a lot of work has gone into upgrading the graphics quality of assets used in the prior Altspace version. 

Despite that work, one shouldn't expect high-end video game graphics. The avatars and other elements still look a lot like Altspace or other early metaverse platforms. Jacobson acknowledges that a lot of it is still a work in progress. “We’re very nascent. We’re a tiny team.”

So why then do all this work yourself, as opposed to piggybacking on an existing platform like VRChat, or maybe even Meta’s Horizon Worlds? A lot comes down to the team’s previous experience with Altspace. “We have this nervousness and anxiety over building on somebody else's platform,” Demos says. Case in point: out of the 40 or so platforms they considered to replace Altspace, a handful have since shut down.

A permanent home for burners

Another issue is what Demos and Jacobson described as misaligned incentives. The duo wanted to capture Burning Man’s spirit, which includes a ban on commercial activity. “Once you go into the bubble of Burning Man, there's no hot dog vendors and T-shirt vendors,” Jacobson says. “It's a non-commercial space. It's a gift society.”

BRCvr tries to adhere to the same principles that guide Burning Man, which precludes it from selling avatars or using corporate sponsors — things that are often out of your control on another company’s platform. At the same time, there are significant costs associated with running BurnerSphere, which is why some content and experiences are reserved for members who pay an annual $48 “camp fee.”

The plan, according to Demos, is to offer the more than 100,000 “burners” who attend Burning Man events every year a permanent digital home. A space they can gather year-round, and a way for “burner-curious” people to explore the festival, no matter where they are — all without the commercial pressure that comes with building a venture-funded metaverse. “This is not designed to be a massive free platform that hockey sticks,” Jacobson says.

Will a Burning Man-specific social VR platform that relies on member dues work? Demos and Jacobson openly admit it’s a gamble. “We're at the beginning,” Jacobson says. “We don't know what's going to happen. But if the platform goes under, at least, we'll make it go under, not some corporation.”

The company that brought us Qai Qai now wants to turn us all into AI storytellers

When former MGM executive Tricia Biggio co-founded the animation startup Invisible Universe in 2020 to create short-form content for social media, her team initially took traditional animation tools like Maya to build a production pipeline optimized for speed and efficiency. 

The company's goal was to create “the franchises of the future,” as Biggio told me during a recent conversation. One example for that: Qai Qai, the doll of Serena Willams’ daughter, which Invisible Universe brought to life on Instagram.

Then came the generative AI boom – and with it, a whole lot of chaos. “There were 20 new tools a week,” Biggio said. “Some of them worked really well. Some of them were really impossible [to use]. Some of them were terrible.”  What’s more, even the good tools were just pieces of a much larger puzzle, requiring production teams to download a clip here, generate a voice there, and then import everything into their existing tools.

Undeterred, the Invisible Universe team kept testing. Through those tests, it eventually developed a kind of product roadmap for a solution optimized for the company’s own work. And soon, that roadmap turned into an internal AI pipeline, which allowed Invisible Universe to cut production costs by 95%.

Encouraged by those results, the company turned its own pipeline into a product dubbed Invisible Studio that it first marketed to enterprise clients. These clients, which according to Biggio include a large toy maker, have already been using Invisible Studio to produce more than 14,000 videos for social media, internal pitches and more.

During a recent video call, Biggio demonstrated the capabilities of the platform to me by creating a story from scratch – a process that included creating a storyboard, a script, character art, AI voices and generative videos. Not only did the platform put these things together in minutes, it also queried multiple image and video generation models simultaneously to give users various options to choose from, and  even included an option to edit the result on the fly.

Today, the company is taking the next step and opening up these capabilities to everyone, with plans starting at $10 a month. The goal was to make Invisible Studio cheap enough for YouTubers and Roblox creators to use it, while also offering something powerful enough that even works in professional environments – including the company’s own in-house production studio.

“We first and foremost built this for ourselves,” Biggio said. “We were our own first customer.”

What else

Google announces its new AI home assistant. Gemini for Home will replace the existing Google Assistant on smart speakers and displays starting this fall.

Viewers love Korean content. Studios are making less of it. Talk about bad timing: The amount of South Korean content being produced is going down just as its popularity is exploding, according to a new analysis.

Netflix has signed up Mark Rober. Another example of Netflix embracing popular YouTubers. Rober will host a competition show for the streamer next year.

Dreampark expands to Seattle. It’s the first time the “downloadable theme park” is launching with an indoor location. Check out my story about Dreampark here.

Amazon may switch to AOSP for high-end tablet. That’s according to Reuters, which is also reporting that the company will bring its Vega OS to lower-end devices.

The PS5 is getting more expensive. Sony is raising the price of the console by $50. Thanks, tariffs!

A new pair of smart glasses records everything. The new AI device is made by two former Harvard students who previously turned Meta’s Ray-Bans into a privacy nightmare.

Meta boots app from Quest store that simplified sideloading. The app made it easier to download Android app / .apk files directly to the Quest.

That’s it

We're having some major changes in our home, as our oldest left for college this week. Kids … they grow up so fast! And cost so! much! money! Totally worth it, of course. Still, higher education is terribly expensive. The good news is that I found a way for you all to contribute to our college fund: Just sign up for a paid Lowpass subscription 😉

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!