Gather.Town?

[ffutures]

This year's Eastercon (UK national SF con) will be an online event, of course, but the conferencing system they're using for it is new to me - Gather.Town - apparently they feel that Zoom, Discord etc., e.g. software people have actually some experience using, is not good enough for their vision of the con.

I tried taking a look at this on my Windows PC last night and their web site kept crashing browser windows, which wasn't very helpful. When I tried it on my MacBook Pro (which is what I'll probably be using since it has a camera) it sulked because it wants to run on Chrome, not Safari, but eventually let me access via Safari. It won't run on tablet computers or phones at all.

So far my impression is that it's cutesy crap. The user interface looks like a game for five year olds, and there appears to be no way to use it if you're blind or have trouble with coordination. You have to move little icons of a person around a map (by keyboard control only, no mouse or pad) to access anything, and it's painfully slow. The idea appears to be to force people to encounter each other socially by wandering around the map, not just click from one event to another, and I wouldn't mind if it was just there as an option, but having it as the only way to access things seems a little silly - if this is to work at all the social space between the event locations will have to be big, requiring a lot of movement to get from one event to another. For me it will be a problem - when I'm working on my main computer the laptop is on a shelf with the keyboard at roughly shoulder height, and trying to operate the keyboard gets physically painful after a couple of minutes. The touchpad is better, but that doesn't seem to be an option with Gather.Town

The largest event I can find on line that used it seems to have been around a hundred people (not sure how big Eastercon will be, probably a lot more) and they were using other interfaces for a lot of the organisational stuff such as panel scheduling. Given what I've seen of it I'm doubtful it will work very well as the only way to get around.

Does anyone have any experience of this other than their demo site? If so, what did you think of it?

Comments

[purplecat]

Several big AI conferences have used Gather.Town. It's nicest feature is that it reduces the "broadcast to all" aspect of Zoom - so you only video conference to people your icon is close to but you can move freely to other groups if you see someone you want to talk to and you can still "broadcast to all" from the stages and microphones - so its much more like the free-flowing style of an actual conference than a webinar.

At IJCAI, where I was giving a tutorial, moving up to the stage in our designated room on Gather.Town automatically opened up a Zoom session so for the presentation part it still had all the functionality of Zoom.

At AAAI I had a poster and they had set up a poster room - so you could see all the posters, the person presenting the poster stood next to their poster and people could come and talk to them.

All that said, I don't think online conferences really work - or at least professional ones don't - I don't get a week off work commitments to attend so I don't hang around looking for people I know to chat to, instead I get on with my regular work and only check into the conference if I'm presenting or there is an event I really want to see. It may work better for a non-professional conference where people will have made the time available - but obviously not if it has accessibility issues.

[ffutures]

Thanks - maybe I'm underestimating it then.

[joseph_teller]

Some quick research on it.... appears to be a relative new site/app. and apparently claims it can handle up to 2,000 people in a conference setting. It also appears to be more targeted to an educational model than a professional conference model...

There's a review of it here

To me it sounds worse than basic Zoom or Discord.

[ffutures]

Me too - really not looking forward to the con since I saw what it was like.

[murphys_lawyer]

Me being me, I went straight to their Privacy and Security pages. I did not like what I saw, starting with "We can't save data in the EU or Germany at the current time and thus cannot meet full compliancy for GDPR" and going rapidly downhill from there.

I think I need to have words with the Committee.

[vicarage]

I'm not sure they will have capacity issues, merely because lots of people aren't signing up because of the bad vibes, and I doubt many will be at their keyboards all weekend. The RSFG and SHSFG were very negative about it all.

I tried the demo, and while it worked on one of my 3 Linux browsers on the desktop where I have no camera, it limped along on Safari only on the ipad with the camera, very much beta on a tablet.

[julesjones]

Oh, that sounds nice for those of us using speech recognition software.

I was already leaning strongly to not going, partly because it's the social aspects I'll miss at a virtual con, but if the system to allow a substitute for hanging in the bar with friends is like that I'd rather just set up a Teams group with some friends. (I do not like the idea of Zoom and its attitude to security and personal information - we are banned from using it at work for a reason.)