Launch HN: Venu (YC W21) – True-to-Life 3D Virtual Trade Shows

What experience do you base that on?

From what I've seen, the attendees genuinely love visiting trade shows. Actually, it's one of the few examples of people voluntarily paying for ads to be shown to them.

Trade shows are like the adult "Disney World" with "toys" relevant to their professional area:

+ Interior designers like the annual Kitchen & Bath trades shows. They like the furniture trade shows.

+ Home builders like trade shows of new architectural products and construction materials

+ cabinet makers like the woodworking machinery trade shows to see what new technology can make their factory run better. Similar with machine shops attending annual CNC & metalworking trade shows.

+ music store employees enjoy visiting the annual NAMM show to see latest gear for making and recording music

+ security experts attend surveillance tech trade show showing latest cameras, locks, laser mics, etc

+ Not just working professionals but also end consumers pay to attend trade shows such as CES Consumer Electronics Show, and Home & Garden shows that are popular in big cities each Spring.

The trade show that may be boring to some is the enterprise software type where one booth is Oracle and the next booth is Xerox showing their document management solutions.

[Edit to reply] : >Most of the time though, the attendees would be bored. Walking around, not talking to anyone, waiting for time to pass

Understand that but that's also how people walking around at Disney's parks appear as well. People do look bored in between the 2 minute thrill of the rides. That's different from concluding that "nobody wants to be at Disney" or generalizing to "nobody really WANTS to be at a trade show". There are many interesting trade shows that attract attendees and they pay for their own tickets to be exposed to the latest developments in their areas of interest.

The type of trade show that would have bored disengaged attendees would be the ones where most of the tickets are paid by the employers. (E.g. enterprise software event.)

But there are other trade shows where people genuinely want to be there. E.g. the farm trade shows where farmers will drive 4 hours to see the latest tractors and farm equipment to make their lives easier. And yes, the farmers may look bored while they are walking the trade show floor. :-)

Tradeshows about new tech for example, such as CES, typically are interesting for people to discover what new things are being developed.

Venu is a business trade fair event platform, accessed via a virtual reality client, created for use in devices like the wireless Oculus Quest VR headset or the PC wired VR headsets like HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Valve Index, or Windows Mixed Reality. In addition, we have made this available as a Windows or Mac client.

Venu also allows me, as an end-user, to go into the trade show platform, in first-person view. So, I do not see my own avatar, but I meet other avatars in face-face conversations. I can walk up to another avatar (with name tag/email above the head), see that this is someone I would like to conduct business with and start a conversation. I can also move my mouse over the other avatar's head, to the email address, where a cursor will appear for me to send an email to this person in real time.

Our competitors in the 2D grid of faces space, in conferences and events are: Zoom, Hopin, and SpotMe.

Our pseudo competitors in the 3D space are a bit fuzzy. From what I can tell, vFairs has animation and people navigate to the booth image, click on it, and connect to the exhibitor via a webcam. But, they have not created their conference / exhibit in virtual reality. And, there are a few out there like vFairs.

Thanks again for your question.