Some of my IEEE VR Tweets
Over the weeks up to and during IEEE VR, I did more tweeting than I normally do. Generally, I try to post things here, or on my micro.blog (bmaci.me), and let them forward through to twitter. (I then regularly purge tweets, without losing my posts). So, here's some image grabs plus links, so they don't go away when I next purge.
One of my favorite "random last minute ideas" was to create a social / birds-of-a-feather program. We ended up having more than 20 BOFs and they were some of the things people talked about the most.
Both because the topic was suddenly so pertinent and because we wanted to use it as a "dry run, last minute test" of the system, we moved the Virtual Conferencing workshop from Sunday to the Friday before ....
... and then, because the "last minute test" part did, in fact, turn up issues, we moved it back.
A student at Georgia Tech, Rhiannon Berry, made this awesome little avatar creator, that many of the IEEE VR attendees ended up using. Huge shout-out to her!
It was pretty exciting Saturday night, to have things pretty much ready to go and do some final testing. While I worried about jinxing things, I couldn't resist a post when it looked like everything was ready.
Once things were well and officially underway, my first "picture taken of folks watching the conference stream in Hubs" tweet was more relieving than exciting.
I spent a lot of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday helping the 3DUI and Demo presenters get set up in their Hubs rooms. We provided a default room, but a lot of them ventured our and created their own spaces.
I was particularly pleased with the "Three Streams" viewing rooms, where you could keep an eye on all three streams and move between them without having to jump to a different room. I think they were among the most popular places to watch the talks in Hubs.
Throughout the conference I had some fun chat's with Kent Bye (I posted a link to his epic Twitter thread in a previous post), it was good to see others come up with new ideas, but also suggest some of the same ones that we'd had but didn't implement (often because of time, sometimes because of architectural or technical issues). Revisiting them after we'd made other changes to the system sometimes led to new solutions: for example, a way of doing simple sharding based on unrelated changes we'd made to the home page.
Had some fun hanging out in the various sponsor and social rooms, chatting with folks, taking selfies and videos.
Like some others, I did find some time to hang out in the evenings with some friends. Things got both fun and weird at times.
There were a good amount of other tweets, re-tweets and discussion, but these were some of the highlights for me.
I'll close with one of my last tweets, as we prepared for the closing remarks at the end of the conference.
