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Australian academics refuse to attend US conferences for fear of being detained (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/world@quokk.au
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[–] 10 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

Hear me out. Host them online and from multiple locations at once. I know we're not quite there in terms of vr or ar, but I've spent plenty of time wasting time in VRC with limeies and kiwis and it was seamless to communicate effectively as if we were standing 2 ft apart while being on opposite sides of the planet. Flying is bad for the planet sincerely an American.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    As someone who often attends and speaks at these type of events, I would advice against that. The main benefit of these events lies in the connections people make. These connections are very personal and don't really work in a virtual context (yet, might in the future though). Most innovations are inspired by having a chat with other people and just throw some ideas and different perspectives around. That won't happen if you treat a conference as a Teams meeting, people would just dial in, give their presentation and leave. Frankly, most presentations or talks during these conferences could have been (usually are) an article anyways. It's the discussions that happen outside of these agenda items where the value is.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I would guess that you have not experienced social VR yet. As I said above as far as communication goes, it's like physically being in the same room with 80 other people even though the closest person to me is actually 300 miles away. Is it perfect? No. Is it clunky at times? Yes very at minimum you need to wear a headset and have controllers and trackers. The technology is not fully developed at this point, however there is profound potential. With the current social video game. VRC I can connect to a virtual world grab a virtual marker and draw my entire idea out or write out math or poetry or any other thing I want and display it to them there in real time and they can collaborate with me in real time. There are also ways to easily share most media formats.

    Within the next 10 years, I guarantee you somebody's going to build an entire company off integrating that kind of tech into a purpose-built Business solution

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Technology is moving fast, I have experienced something similar in a metaverse like setting (release of a new luxury watch in a metaverse). It was a bit odd to describe. The vibe was closer to a Nintendo Mii gathering than an actual meeting. I'm sure one day we will get into the realm of sci-fi VR meetings, basically teleportation without actually moving. Just look at how quickly video calling went from sci-fi to basically being the norm in business these days.

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