Virtual festive roundup for loners

It can often feel like slim pickings when you’re scrambling around for virtual xmas events. Here, we look at some online options if you're spoiled for choice and simply don’t know where to put yourself this festive season.

Let’s get the bleeding consumerism out of the way shall we? Good! – Disney, Zara, Louis Vuitton, Adidas, Burberry, Coca-Cola, Vans, Balenciaga, BooHoo and Clinique have great interactive virtual offerings, report Techxplore – I’ve tried making the Coca Cola snowglobe and it was quite fun.

If sports are your thing, then you can try Nikeland on Roblox to play basketball, football, parkour, dodgeball obstacle courses and you can even create your own sport. That sounds like fun – anyone for “Blitzen Ball?”

Fortnite’s Winter Fest is the big online event everyone is talking about, lasting the whole festive season from Friday December 20th to Tuesday 7th January, with new Snoop Dogg and Shaq skins. The whole map is covered in snow, with frozen rivers and lakes for ice skating. Don’t push your colleagues over if they are joining you!

The world's largest virtual market (Virtual Market 2024) is here with a reported 1.3 million visitors worldwide. This is basically an immersive sensation with lots of experiences, including an amusement park, a snowman's storytime factory, an alluring spacecraft and a huge interactive music market. It will run until December 22nd, go get on it fast before it leaves town.

For horror fans, the game Phasmophobia is focussing on Krampus, the iconic horned creature that follows Santa and punishes naughty children and this runs until the 31st December. There are maps and brochures detailing all ghost sightings and interactions with Krampus, so if true immersion and depth is your preference, go here.

If you would simply like to go all-in on singing Christmas carols and miss the traditional aspect of Christmas, then Healing Our Earth has a singalong on Sunday 22nd December at 2pm, GMT or 9am EST. Not too early for a Sunday morning.

If you already have a VR headset then head over to Arctic Sun for some cool wintry games such as Ice Fishing and even a Santa Simulator whereby you are the man in red. The premise is simply launching presents down chimneys to your hearts content.

For VR connoisseurs, the Pimax Virtual Reality Christmas event on December 22nd has details here.

And speaking of the man in red again, the team over at Tavus have developed an AI Santa where you can have a daily five minute phone call with him. They include a naughty to nice scale in which you might try saying some scandalous things to manipulate the results a bit. I tried my best but the worst I got was that I’m “a mixed bag.”

Finally, the guys from Manchester, UK – Near Life (augmented educational solutions) have gamified being an elf and it’s pretty nifty, if I do say so myself.

Plenty to do online, in an albeit fragmented sense, but isn’t that more fun than watching Home Alone again while you’re home, alone? Just saying.