Secondary ticketing platform StubHub has introduced a new Virtual View feature to its app, providing customers with a 360° view of the venue from the seat they are purchasing.
Available now, customers can use the virtual reality feature to check out the view from the seat they wish to buy across a number of venues, including The O2 Arena and Wembley Stadium. There are also plans to roll Virtual View out across The SSE Wembley Arena, Stadium of Light (Sunderland), Royal Albert Hall, Twickenham Stadium, Goodison Park (Liverpool) and White Hart Lane (London).
The feature builds on StubHub’s static View From Section, letting users pan around the stadium from seat regions. Users can see the experience with or without VR goggles. Without goggles, users will move their phone around to see different angles; with goggles, users will put their phones into the cardboard and pan their heads for the angles. Virtual View automatically configures itself and optimises for different types of cardboard viewers. Different cardboard viewers have different properties, such as primary button type, screen lens distance, Inter-lens distance and screen vertical alignment. Virtual View is designed to accommodate for all of these differences.
Estanis Martín de Nicolás, StubHub’s international general manager said: “StubHub is committed to bringing the best possible ticket experience to its customers and we are proud to be the first ticketing company to utilise Virtual Reality in the UK. The Virtual View feature allows customers to get a much better sense of the real view that they will experience from each seat before they buy it. With a huge summer of sport on the horizon and a host of great gigs coming up, we are excited to be launching Virtual View and to help our customers make an informed purchasing decision.”
Speaking to Music Week, de Nicolás also offered his take on the recent Waterson report into secondary ticketing. The report from Professor Michael Waterson made a series of recommendations including that a lead body, such as National Trading Standards, carry out a compliance investigation to ensure enforcement action is taken if rules outlined in the Consumer Rights Act (CRA), such as the publication of details including the face value of the ticket, seat number and any applicable restrictions, are ignored by online sites.
“We are totally in favour of transparency and disclosure, but one important consideration is that transparency and disclosure can used by the promoter to cancel the original tickets,” he said. “We fully believe in transparency, but it should not come at the expense of people’s right to re-sell.”
