Gather.Town sessions will take place each day 30 minutes prior to the official start of the conference as well as at the end of each day. You can see the time slots on the programme page marked in red colour.

Participants can join the GCF2021.Town on Gather in a 2D world with 8-bit graphics, walking around the virtual conference venue by moving their avatar with their keyboard’s arrow keys. Please note that an avatar marked “anonymous” or carrying an invented name such as e.g. “007” does not get interaction, since participants are looking to interact with other participants. We thus encourage you to use your full name.

Poster Rooms

We will have 4 poster display rooms, where posters will already be pre-loaded and organized in a grid similar to an in-person conference.

To interact with a poster, conference attendees will walk up to the poster and press the “x” key to enter a full screen viewing. While viewing the poster, they will also be able to interact with the presenter.

An example poster room looks like this:

When your avatar is in the private space near a poster, all other conference attendees in that space will be able to see and hear you through your webcam and microphone. You will only be interacting with people in this space, and not the neighbouring spaces. This promotes conversation with the presenter without interrupting conversation going on at other posters.

Poster presenters will need to create their poster such that it suits the formatting requirements of GatherTown. Posters will need to be submitted to the organizers before the conference on June 8 at the latest (more details on this process to come!). 

In addition to providing organizers with a poster that attendees will view in full screen mode, presenters must also provide a smaller, “thumbnail” version of their poster that can be quickly viewed at the bottom of the screen as people walk near their poster (see example below). This is an example of the preview others can see before they directly engage with presenters.