Metaverse events: building a virtual event platform people attend

Metaverse events take place in a 3D or spatial venue that attendees enter from a browser or a headset. This guide explains the architecture of such a virtual event platform, how it handles a large audience, which features sponsors expect, where blockchain fits, and what a build costs.

A platform for these events joins a venue to the systems every event needs: registration, ticketing, live streaming, voice and video between attendees, sponsor spaces and analytics. The hardest engineering problem is scale, because thousands of attendees watch the same keynote while small groups still need to talk in the hallway at the same time.

Virtual events went through two waves. In 2020 and 2021, conferences moved online within weeks, mostly onto video-call and webinar tools. A wave of 3D venues followed, and many of those venues were harder to use than a simple agenda page. The formats that lasted use spatial presence for a clear purpose, such as networking areas where people move between conversations, expo floors, product launches, concerts, and hybrid events that bring remote attendees into a physical venue.

What the 3D layer is for at metaverse events

Before you choose technology, list the moments in the event that gain from spatial presence. Each moment has a format that suits it:

Many platforms are mostly 2D and use 3D for a few moments. Busy professionals usually join from laptops, and for them a top-down map with proximity voice gives the networking benefit without 3D navigation.

Virtual event platform architecture

Broadcast and interactive media

The main design decision is to separate broadcast media from interactive media.

• Broadcast. The platform encodes the stage feed once and delivers it through a content delivery network (CDN). Delivery uses HLS or low-latency HLS, or WebRTC when the delay must stay under one second. A CDN serves very large audiences at a low cost per viewer.
• Interactive. Attendees talk to each other over WebRTC through a selective forwarding unit (SFU), such as LiveKit, mediasoup or Janus. SFU cost grows with the number of active streams, so each room needs a capacity limit. The SFU should forward only nearby speakers and use adaptive bitrate and simulcast layers.

Stage Q&A connects the two systems. A moderator moves an attendee from the audience into the interactive speaker room, and the platform mixes that attendee's feed into the broadcast. The IETF published WHIP as RFC 9725 in March 2025, giving a standard way to send a WebRTC feed into a streaming service or CDN.

The venue client

Build the venue in the browser with Three.js, Babylon.js or PlayCanvas to reach the most attendees. Keep the first download small, so people can enter within seconds on a laptop or phone. Unreal Pixel Streaming can send a detailed venue to any browser as video. Each concurrent viewer then needs a cloud GPU, and that cost grows fast at conference size. Offer a headset version through WebXR or a native Quest app only if a large share of attendees will use one.

Presence and state

A real-time server tracks attendee positions, avatar states and booth occupancy. Common choices are Colyseus, Nakama, Photon or a custom service. Interest management sends each client updates about nearby attendees only, and large spaces are split into instances. Two thousand people in an expo hall usually means many copies of the hall, each holding a manageable number of avatars and showing the same stage stream.

Event services

• Registration, ticketing and access control, often connected to existing tools through an API or webhooks.
• Agenda, speaker management and session scheduling across time zones.
• Chat, Q&A, polls and moderation queues.
• A sponsor portal for booth content, lead capture and reports.
• Recordings and an on-demand library after the event.
• Analytics for attendance per session, time spent per booth and number of conversations.

Scale and reliability

Most attendees arrive in the five minutes before the opening keynote, so a failure at that moment affects the largest number of people.

1. Load-test with bots. Test at 1.5 to 2 times the expected peak, with bots that join, talk, chat and download assets at the same time.
2. Scale up in advance. Add SFU capacity, real-time servers and warm CDN caches before the doors open, because autoscaling reacts too slowly for a spike of this size.
3. Stagger entry. Use a lobby or pre-show that loads assets while attendees wait.
4. Add a fallback. If the 3D venue fails on a device, switch that attendee to a 2D page with the stream and chat.
5. Rehearse. Run a full rehearsal with the real speakers on their own hardware and networks.
6. Staff a production desk. During the event, staff monitor the streams, moderate chat and follow a written plan for each type of failure.

Sponsor and revenue features

Sponsors often pay for much of the event, so the platform needs tools for them. Common features are:

• Booth templates where sponsors add a logo, videos, documents and 3D product models in glTF.
• Staffed voice rooms at each booth, with appointment booking.
• Lead capture that asks for the attendee's consent.
• Reports on visits, time spent at the booth and conversations.

Track attendees only as far as they agreed. The GDPR and similar laws apply to event data in the same way they apply to any website.

Where blockchain fits

Most event platforms need no blockchain. A few features can use one:

• NFT tickets. The organizer sets resale rules, such as a price cap that its own marketplace enforces. The guide to NFT ticketing platform development covers the design choices.
• Attendance badges. Attendees collect a token that proves they were at the event.
• Token-gated sessions. Only holders of a given NFT can enter, which suits communities built around a collection.

Use embedded wallets or claim links so attendees without a crypto wallet can still take part. The event must work for people who never use the blockchain.

Accessibility

Attendees who cannot move through the venue miss the event. Provide these features:

• Live captions and recordings with transcripts.
• Keyboard navigation and an agenda and chat that work with screen readers.
• A mode without 3D.
• Settings for motion and audio levels.

The W3C's WCAG 2.2 guidelines are a common baseline for the 2D parts of the platform, and the 3D parts need an alternative path that gives access to the same content.

Hybrid events and recordings

Many events are now hybrid, with a physical venue and a remote audience. In a hybrid event, a production crew creates the stage feed instead of the speakers' webcams. The platform must accept broadcast inputs over SRT or RTMP from a video switcher and add little delay. Remote attendees need a way to send questions to the moderator in the room. In-room attendees can use the same app for the agenda, chat and networking, so the two audiences can meet. A 3D copy of the physical venue helps remote attendees find their way, but the schedule and stream quality matter more to them.

Recordings extend the event. Edit each session and publish it to an on-demand library with chapters and searchable transcripts. A persistent venue can host meetups, sponsor office hours or community meetings between annual events. Plan storage, content rights and speaker consent for recordings from the start, and decide in advance how long the platform keeps attendee data.

Build, buy or extend

Many hosted platforms already offer streaming, networking and sponsor booths. A custom build suits an organizer whose core business is events, or one that needs deep integration with its own systems or has special needs for branding, scale, privacy or data location. Otherwise, many organizers add a custom 3D venue to an existing streaming and registration service.

Cost and timeline

The ranges below are estimates that multiply team size by duration and by a blended rate of $60 to $150 per hour, counting a month as about 160 hours per person.

Each event also has running costs, which include SFU and TURN servers, CDN bandwidth, streaming, cloud GPUs for pixel streaming and production staff. Estimate these costs per attendee-hour.

The 3D metaverse space guide covers how venues are built, and the social metaverse guide covers persistent social spaces. The overview of metaverse development services covers the whole category.

Frequently asked questions