First published October 2026

Why crowds gather around VR: the spectator effect

At every event where we run VR, the same thing happens within the first half hour. One person puts a headset on, and a small group forms at a respectful distance to watch. Then the group gets bigger, and the people at the back start asking the people at the front what is happening. Nobody organised this. It is the most reliable piece of free marketing in the room, and it is worth understanding why it happens, because it can be designed for or accidentally designed out.

VR is a private medium in a public room

The starting point is an awkward one for anyone selling VR as an event attraction: a headset is isolating by default. Research on public VR installations puts it plainly - the head-mounted display engages only the wearer and excludes everyone else in the room. A person standing two metres away sees someone waving at nothing. Without deliberate design, the most engaging technology on the floor produces a queue of people staring at the back of a stranger’s head.

That finding comes from observational work across seven public installations, published at the DIS 2022 conference by Greuter, Mueller and Hoang. The researchers documented what they called the honeypot effect: spectators attract more spectators. One person watching becomes a signal that something is worth watching, and the signal compounds. It is an observation rather than a measurement - nobody has quantified the multiplier, and we should not pretend otherwise - but it matches what operators see in the field.

The journey from passer-by to performer

The same research describes a role journey that will be familiar to anyone who has run a public activation. A passer-by notices something. A bystander stops for a moment. A spectator settles in to watch. A reflector talks about what they have seen, often to the person beside them. A queuer decides to try. A performer puts the headset on and becomes the thing everyone else is watching.

The most useful detail in that sequence is what happens in the queue. People learn the controls by watching the person in front of them, which means the queue is not dead time - it is the briefing. By the time a guest reaches the front, they have usually seen the headset fitted, heard the instructions twice, and worked out which way to turn. That is an argument for keeping the queue where it can see the play area, not tucked around a corner to keep the aisle clear.

The screen is not decoration

Meta’s event guidance makes a related point: watching real players in real time is far more engaging than a looping trailer, and the screen should be the largest the space allows. A trailer shows a game. A live feed shows a person - someone’s colleague, someone’s boss - reacting in real time. That is a different kind of entertainment, and it is the mechanism behind the crowd.

There is a subtlety, though, and it depends on who the screen is for. A 2021 CHI study surveyed 217 remote viewers of streamed VR and found they preferred first-person feeds, because that is the view that shows the game. A screen at an event serves the opposite audience: people standing in the room, who can already see the player’s body. For them, a shared spectator view that shows what the player sees, with enough context to understand the space, does more work than a raw first-person feed. Knowing which audience the screen serves is the design decision; the largest-screen advice assumes you have made it.

The queue is the conversion moment

If the crowd is the advert, the queue is where the advert gets acted on. Meta’s event guidance treats time in line as prime attendee contact rather than a holding pattern, and recommends having someone whose job is the line - not to police it, but to talk to it. In our experience that person does more for a brand than the headset does, because they are the only part of the activation that can answer a question.

The shareability numbers point the same way. EventTrack’s 2026 study, which is US self-report data sponsored by an agency, found that 87% of attendees say they will share show experiences with people who were not there, and 62% captured photos or video. It also reported that 59% feel more positive about a brand after a live event. Those are sentiments rather than measured outcomes, and the sponsorship is worth remembering, but they describe a room full of people inclined to talk about what they just saw. A crowd gives them something to photograph.

Does a crowd mean anything for the brand?

Here the evidence needs handling with care. The strongest related research is about experiences rather than VR. A national survey of 1,263 people by Van Boven and Gilovich found 57% said experiences made them happier than possessions, against 34% who said the reverse, and later work by Kumar, Killingsworth and Gilovich found that anticipating an experience is more pleasurable than anticipating a purchase. That is a good argument for spending a budget on something people do rather than something they receive. It is not evidence that a crowd around a headset builds brand recall, and we will not stretch it into one.

The field study of real trade fairs is a better fit, with its own limit: visitor counts at those fairs included bystanders as well as participants. So when the research reports that AR and VR stands drew 30% to 80% more visitors than the fair average, part of that lift is people watching rather than playing. For an exhibitor, that is not a technicality. A crowd at the edge of a stand is still a crowd at the stand, and it changes how the stand reads from the aisle.

Designing for the second row

The practical lesson is that a VR activation has two audiences and only one headset. The player needs a clear space, a short round and a calm briefing. The second row needs a screen at eye height, a host who explains what is happening, and a reason to stay for one more round. Get the second row right and the first row fills itself. Get it wrong and you have an expensive demonstration for six people at a time.

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Sources

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