This Couple Just Got Hitched In A Surreal Virtual Reality Wedding – Vocativ

The bride is a sleek white robot with accents of pink on her shinyexterior. The groom is identical, except withblue trimaround his head and body. They are standingin front of more thana dozen guests some robots, some cutesyhuman avatars on a platform built over a churning red lake of lava. Glowingcloudsloom in the distanceof this strangespace,asguests unleashsmiley face and heart emojis to register their joy, and a disco ball spins overhead.

Welcome to one of thefirst-ever virtual reality weddings.

On Thursday, Elisa Evans and Martin Shervington, a couple from Wales,did just as so many couplesdo on their wedding day. She slippedona white wedding dress, he donneda suit, and then they headed to a local wedding venue.

It was all very traditional, really except that when they got there, there were no guests or officiantspresent. Instead, they each put ona VR headset and entered a virtual futuristic disco, asShervington put it. Their officiant, a community managerfrom the virtual reality companyAltspaceVR, beamed infrom San Francisco. Guests gathered from all over the world using the AltspaceVR app all of them sitting in their respective homes and offices, connected onlybytheirheadsets.

The very first virtual reality wedding of this sort happened in San Francisco in 1994 backwhen peoplewere still earnestlyusing the termcyperspace. The bride, an employee at an early virtual reality company, and groom, usedcrude headsets and graphics, withgear totaling an estimated $1 million. But Shervington, a business consultantwho recently helped launch a VR companys app, stakes the claim thathe and his bride are the first to get virtually hitched in this new age of accessible consumer headsettechnology and in a legally-binding ceremony.

Companies are justbeginning to captureweddings with 360-degree cameras, so that couples, along with family and friends, can relive the big day in immersive VR.A truly virtual wedding like this one, though, has a bizarre, niche appeal which is, perhaps, why Evans andShervington are likely only the second couple to do it.

Shervington proposed to Evans in November, after just a fewmonths ofdating, and a friend was quick to suggest that they do itin VR. It was fun, he said of the idea. That was where it began. Its also been a challenge conceptually. With new technology, I enjoy exploring, so its been an experience going through and puttingtogether thepieces.Along the way, though, we just want to laugh.

Plus, Shervington who has done stand-up comedy, including in VR, about things like the singularity and artificial intelligence is a bit of a sci-fi and tech geek. Evans not so much, but shes gamely gone along with the plan. I thought it sounded like a lot of fun, she said. Its so different, and we knew we didnt want to have a conventional wedding.

During the ceremony, Evans andShervington stood several feet away from each other with a wall in between themto avoid any audio feedback from the mics in their respective headsets.In VR, their avatars stood next to each other in front of a largescreen thatShervington used to display a Powerpoint-like presentation that took up most of the hour-long ceremony and could easily have been mistaken for anawkwardstandup routine. He told the story about how they met and fell in love, peppering his speech with inside jokes, random YouTubeclips, many of which took a painful amount of time to load, andsnippets of music Queen and The RollingStones made appearances.

It was an indulgent, self-involved affair rife withtechnical difficulties in otherwords, a whole lot like a regular wedding. And, just as with any wedding, there were a lot of details to decide on. Only, in addition to the usual questions around things like theguest listand music,they also had to design their avatars, choose a virtual venue, and work out a bunch of technical challenges. In fact, as he put it, the virtual has hadmuch more attention than the real world in the details.

Some of those challenges were unsurmountable. When the officiant instructed the couple to seal their vows with a kiss, their avatars leaned in toward each other, not quite touching and, of course,Evans and Shervington were physically separated and wearing bulky headsets in the real world, none of which exactly allows for that picture-perfect moment.

For guests, too, it was a somewhat awkward experience. To prevent total chaos, only a limited number were allowed to attend with a physical avatar, while the rest could watch a YouTube livestream of the virtual wedding.Our avatars milled about at will, with nowhere to sit. I would try navigating in front of another guest for a better view, only to have someone else step right in front of me. At one point, as the couple waspreparing to exchange vows, I accidentally directed my avatar to stand right in between Evans andShervingtons avatars embarrassing. (I wasnt the only one either it was as though wed all already gotten tanked atthe open bar.) Also, forget showing up in the same dress trydiscovering that youve chosenthe exact same avatar as another weddingguest.

But, most notable of all,my VR goggles keptfogging up, as they tend to do over prolonged periods of use. So, instead of the usual periodic wiping of tears at a wedding, I was routinely cleaning my headset.

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This Couple Just Got Hitched In A Surreal Virtual Reality Wedding - Vocativ