From 3-D printed wedding cake decorations and bowties to GIF photo booths and robots that can live-stream your nuptials, scores of couples are turning to latest tech trends to amp up their big day. Welsh couple, Elisa Evans 46 and Martin Shervington 44, took their Wedding Ceremony to a whole new level by getting married in Virtual Reality at their home in Wales.
“Who wouldn’t want to be a time travelling robot with the opportunity to revisit their own wedding? The choice seemed the only way to go,” Shervington told TIME.
About the unconventional ceremony
Evans and Shervington took their vows on May 25th, under a sparkling disco ball on a dreamlike dancefloor with red hot lava filled skies floating overhead. Evans walked down the aisle to "Hamburg Song” by Keane and “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles.
The event was attended by 40 guests in real life and virtually, by their avatars. Each guest avatar could participate in the ceremony by sending smileys, hearts and clapping emojis.
“Some people were expecting us to be dressed up like robots and didn’t quite understand that we were the avatars,” the groom told TIME.
Their wedding was officiated by a community manager from the virtual reality company, AltspaceVR, who joined the VR ceremony from San Francisco.
Once the ceremony was over, the guests sent the couple off by streaming neon purple firework-like "interactables" into the venue.
The Welsh couple spent approximately £1980 a piece on the VR headsets that live-projected their pink and blue robot avatars. The entire ceremony was hosted in a virtual venue designed by AltspaceVR.
After the VR wedding, the guests joined the couple at a real-life cafe-bar for the reception. Their three-tier cake, served at the function, featured the couple’s robot avatars.
The world’s first virtual reality wedding happened in the 1990s
The very first virtual reality wedding took place in 1994 when San Francisco couple Monika and Hugh Jo tied the knot in a “cyberspace” wedding ceremony on the island of Atlantis.
The couple used crude headsets and graphics, with gear costing over £780,000.
“Technically we were about 12 feet apart, but in the virtual space, we were right next to each other for the chariot ride and then when we moved toward the palace, the virtual palace in Atlantis,” Monika Jo told Vice.com.
“[My CEO] helped us find the right people, engineers and VR modellers, and we found some musicians to help us with scoring the VR experience,” she explained.
However, their ability to 'move around' in their virtual world was very limited as the technology wasn’t as evolved as it is today.
Apparently, a third of all weddings are now hi-tech
“A third of all couples are now using tech for their wedding day, a number that is only expected to increase,” said Kelly Gould, editor-in-chief at The Knot, a wedding planner website, in an interview with Today.com.
Speaking of unconventional hi-tech weddings, Evans and Shervington’s VR nuptials isn’t the only hi-tech wedding that made the headlines. In 2013, Marsha Collier and Curt Buthman created history on social media by having a Google Glass wedding in Beverly Hills, California.
Collier walked down the aisle wearing Google Glass that captured both video and photos of the ceremony. The couple also captured their wedding vows in a six second Twitter Vine video for their friends and followers who attended the event digitally.
In 2012, when Laura Cressman married her husband, she chose a very unconventional ring bearer, a bomb disposal robot called the Dragon Runner. On her big day, the unmanned military robot rolled down the aisle, wearing a mini tux.
What’s more, the small droid even grooved a little on the dance floor during the wedding party.
In May 2010, Japanese couple Tomohiro Shibata and Satoko Inouye’s wedding was led by a four-foot tall seated robot named I-Fairy. According to manufacturer Kokoro Co., it was the first marriage that was officiated by an automaton.
