I look at this as complementary rather than replacement. Online shopping didn't replace in-person but gave a better experience for some shopping use cases for some people. Quite a few of both, in fact.

Online shopping needed filters, context and reputation (ratings, reviews, algorithm-aided discovery, etc.). Notably most of that didn't exist for in-person shopping, so we should expect new structures for online events as well - likely ones we haven't anticipated.

May similar develop for humans at virtual events? Here are 40 people you are matched with for the next coffee break. Add a serendipitous element - here is the coffee bar area with 49 (e.g. add 9 'randoms') others - you can drop into the group of 50, and then peel off (or be peeled off) into x minute 2-4 person conversations. You tag the people you want follow-ups with (and the algorithms take note as well) before you are moved into a different subgroup. How would AR enhance all of that?

Quite busy with my startup but throwing thoughts out there for others - it is certainly a space for innovation.

I'm co-founder of Iterative.ai /DVC.org (open source tools for ML) and doing conferences/meetups is an essential part of the business for us (kinda marketing for dev tools). I would definitely recommend you to connect and talk to amazing folks from the https://tulu.la/ team. They are building (still in stealth) a product to run online events with experience as engaging as possible. I'm biased, since I know founders personally (and happy to be their friend!), but they started their company with this vision even before all this coronavirus stuff, they definitely have a big vision in mind for a long term and have been passionate about this space for years. An example would be this online conference they organized a while ago - https://divops.org/. I would happy to connect you (and I'll send a link to this conversation to them).

I working on a tool for better online networking experience.

https://spatial.chat/

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/spatialchat

Though it wasn't designed initially for big online events, due to the outbreak we see the surge in that area. Already landed a couple of 5000-people conferences, and many people use products for meetups and drinking parties.

dm me in twitter https://twitter.com/kidrulit

We are trying to solve this with a twist on 3d spatial video chat. https://laptopsinspace.de

(No mobile support yet)

Edit: this is what it looks like https://twitter.com/neeshstudio/status/1255858585235488771?s...

We're working on helping sell tickets for and build community around Zoom events: https://zmurl.com

We started 2.5 months ago and have seen ~ 10k events of all kinds.

We're hiring engineers :) - victor@zmurl.com

I am in my last two weeks at my full time job. I'll be going full time into my project which gamifies the virtual office in order to create culture for remote teams. I'd love to chat with like minded people.

eric@tengable.com

or twitter

@ericwooley

Going to send you a Twitter DM! I'm really into this space as well and would love to connect with like-minded individuals