GatherTown – online poster session 1

Accessing the virtual poster environment

The online poster session will take place in the virtual environment called GatherTown. We have designed a space specifically for this purpose.

To enhance your experience, here are some pointers that will help you understand what you can expect. GatherTown is a virtual space which you explore using an avatar. This allows for the most realistic real time interactions possible in a virtual environment.

When you first join the space, you will be asked to enable your camera and microphone. We recommend you to enable these so you can interact in the virtual space. Make sure you have a working camera and microphone prior to joining the space.

You will then be promtped to design your avatar. Feel free to do this, as you will be represented by this avatar. You can also change it later.

Then you will be notified about audio and video privacy, calendar integration, and Meeting Reminders. As we are only using GatherTown as a one time thing, you can ignore this. Therefore, select ‘Do it later’.

You will send see a brief tutorial of how to move your avatar.

After that, you finally join the space.

Upon entery, you will be in the main room. Here you can enter private spaces, watch the live stream of the event, or navigate to the poster rooms.

There are three poster rooms. You need to walk through door to get to these spaces. To do this, just walk as far to the wall as you can in the doorway. The three poster rooms are located:

Poster room 1, in the top left corner: subthemes A+G+H

Poster room 2, in the top center: subthemes B+C

Poster room 3, in the top left corner: subthemes D+E+F

There will be reminders in the space about which posters are where.

In each poster room, you will find a poster. When you get within one square of the poster, you will enter the ‘Private Space of that area. A lighter outline appears around the space and the rest of the space greys out. This means that you can now only hear the only participants who are in the space and only they can hear you. To exit the space, you can just move your avatar out of that area.

To view the poster, click x. On the poster, you can zoom in and out and have the others see your pointer at the red circle. To exit the poster view, click x again.

As well as the poster rooms and their private spaces, there are also private spaces sprinkled around the main room. Feel free to use these are meeting spaces, or spaces to chat with online participants. The environment will be open 2 days before the conference starts so you can join ahead of time to get familiar with the environment. You can use the space at other points during the conference, especially for online attendees, this might be nice to have some more interaction.