Friday, October 05, 2007

The future face of conferences?

Having just flown around the world for another meeting, I can't help but wish that someone would put this into production. It's good to meet people occasionally, but given the option, I'd generally prefer to save the cost, carbon emissions, and travel time (or more likely, I'd "attend" more meetings if I could do so virtually).

Mind you, even a decent web-cast of the presentations would be a start, and this would substantially cut down on the technical problems of multi-way communications. Why isn't anyone doing this already (at least, not that I know of in climate science)?

2 comments:

Brian said...

I've signed up for a Second Life avatar to do virtual meetings at work, but no one else I deal with has done so. I kind of feel like the first person who goes out to buy a videophone - doesn't work very well on your own.

James Annan said...

I'm also interested in 2nd life (I wonder if Rob Knop moving there (um, I mean he works for the company that runs it, not that he has actually moved into 2nd life!) will help promote scientific use) but I reckon videoconferencing and/or a robot like this has a much lower hurdle to overcome in terms of actually happening - it means the meatspace meeting can still happen as normal for those who wish to attend, it is just an extra option for those who'd rather not travel for whatever reason.