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I have used gather.town briefly while attending a symposium. While some of the mechanics are complicated and take time getting used to, it was definitely an int

I have used gather.town briefly while attending a symposium. While some of the mechanics are complicated and take time getting used to, it was definitely an interesting experience and unique experience for attending posters in a symposium. However, I am not so sure if it provides much extra benefit than a traditional conference website with posters and social events hosted on Zoom (ex: ICML2020 was nicely set up). Facebook is hosting a networking event for PyTorch Developer Day through gather.town so I am interested to see how that goes. Maybe I will see if gather.town is indeed significantly better for a social event vs. attending posters.

BadInformatics 6y ago
It's funny you mention ICML. After attending a smaller conference that used Gather.Town extensively for their poster session, I strongly believe ICML 2020 made the wrong decision in not trying it (outside of the sparsely populated social area/games room they had). More specifically: 1. First off, the other conference took advantage of Gather.Town's full functionality! This included not only proper poster displays, but also sponsor screens with video embeds, virtual booths with actual humans milling about and an easy-to-navigate floorplan reminiscent of a real poster hall (numbers and all). At ICML, most of us were juggling multiple Zoom links and often forgot to or neglected viewing certain presentations because it took much effort to keep up. 2. In the same vein, ICML's poster session had none of the discoverability or ease of browsing of a physical poster gallery. You couldn't just walk past a poster, notice a crowd asking questions and pop by to listen in for a bit. The somewhat non-deterministic sorting/filtering functionality on the talks list page didn't help either. I saw a number of presenters awkwardly asking idle attendees if they had any questions, as well as folks waiting for a no-show presenter that had probably logged on for 10 minutes, seen an empty room and left the call. Gather.Town mitigates these phenomena by replicating some of the physical signals/affordances of a physical space with actual interested people around and thus makes the whole business of interacting around a poster feel more natural. 3. Post-conference, I saw many comments on Reddit and elsewhere from presenters frustrated by the lack of audience interaction and apparent appreciation/meaningful discussion for their work. It's crazy that some posters at a top-tier conference like ICML didn't get a single visitor. I think that's indicative of how poor the UX (discoverability, spatial cues, ease of browsing, etc.) was for that poster session. A platform like Gather.Town doesn't solve all of those issues, but man does it help.

BadInformatics 6y ago

It's funny you mention ICML. After attending a smaller conference that used Gather.Town extensively for their poster session, I strongly believe ICML 2020 made the wrong decision in not trying it (outside of the sparsely populated social area/games room they had). More specifically: 1. First off, the other conference took advantage of Gather.Town's full functionality! This included not only proper poster displays, but also sponsor screens with video embeds, virtual booths with actual humans milling about and an easy-to-navigate floorplan reminiscent of a real poster hall (numbers and all). At ICML, most of us were juggling multiple Zoom links and often forgot to or neglected viewing certain presentations because it took much effort to keep up. 2. In the same vein, ICML's poster session had none of the discoverability or ease of browsing of a physical poster gallery. You couldn't just walk past a poster, notice a crowd asking questions and pop by to listen in for a bit. The somewhat non-deterministic sorting/filtering functionality on the talks list page didn't help either. I saw a number of presenters awkwardly asking idle attendees if they had any questions, as well as folks waiting for a no-show presenter that had probably logged on for 10 minutes, seen an empty room and left the call. Gather.Town mitigates these phenomena by replicating some of the physical signals/affordances of a physical space with actual interested people around and thus makes the whole business of interacting around a poster feel more natural. 3. Post-conference, I saw many comments on Reddit and elsewhere from presenters frustrated by the lack of audience interaction and apparent appreciation/meaningful discussion for their work. It's crazy that some posters at a top-tier conference like ICML didn't get a single visitor. I think that's indicative of how poor the UX (discoverability, spatial cues, ease of browsing, etc.) was for that poster session. A platform like Gather.Town doesn't solve all of those issues, but man does it help.