Viola van Alphen
Creative Director

Viola van Alphen is the creative director of Manifestations, an Art, Tech & Fun festival during the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, with yearly 35000+ visitors. The edition of Manifestations 2020 was organised online (due to the coronavirus) and reached 170000+ people, 5 times more than the usual physical editions. This shows that the digital festival can also be a great success!

After a year of research, we found out that each target group needs a different platform. A well visited and easy accessible method for audiences new to virtual worlds, for example, is live streaming from these several platforms or from virtual worlds. This way, the target groups that are new to virtual worlds still have a feeling that they participate. Moreover, virtual worlds show unlimited possibilities, but in order to connect well with all different target groups, it is necessary that you choose for open platforms. These open platforms allow artists, audiences, performers, bloggers and community to interact. This way you reach the highest amount of audiences and artists and experience the least censorship (we experienced that YouTube deleted a video after a DJ played one song which didn't had rights in your country, so we switched to Vimeo), etc. And after all, once a user is familiar with one world, it is easy to switch between worlds. We would like to share our experience with you. Learn more about virtual worlds, including Mozilla Hubs, Sansar, Second Life, AR facefilters, 3D-rooms, Zoom and more. www.manifestations.nl