Virtual Poster Session with Gather.town

13 November 2020
By Brett Coup

An ongoing debate in the computer interface design world is whether it’s important or useful to make things on a computer screen look like what they are supposed to represent in the real world. The term for objects that mimic their real world counterparts is skeuomorphism, and we all know this when we see it, even if we don’t know the term.

Apple was an early proponent of a skeuomorphic design philosophy; an Apple “bookshelf” looked like a real bookshelf, the calendar looked like a real desk calendar,  and all those drop shadows and beveled edges on things were meant to mimic physical objects, and make using a computer easier and more familiar. Particularly for older users, skeuomorphic design turned out to be a helpful tool for making computers easier to use.

Screenshot of Apple iBooks

As computing became more common over the years, the thinking around inteface design turned away from skeuomorphism, since a whole generation of people grew up using screens, and the visual metaphors became outdated and anacronystic, like the idea of using a floppy disk icon for the save function.  

Now, for the most part, the online tools that we use at Carleton don’t observe principles of skeuomorphism at all. There is no graphical image of an actual classroom on the Moodle home screen, no green binder on the Moodle gradebook. This might account for part of the reason they can seem awkward to new users and require significant support — there’s no skeuomorphic connection to the real-world counterparts of a Learning Mangement System, so there’s no choice but to dive in and learn the functions and link placement from scratch. (Helpfully, though, LMSs have sort of developed a common set of functionality and even design elements, so once you know one it’s relatively easy to hop to another, even though they don’t visually mimic real-world objects. )

Zoom also has no real skeuomorphic component, unless you teach a class in deep sea diving and the students look at each other through tiny portholes in their helmets. You just have to learn where the buttons and functions are by rote. Now, though, faculty at Carleton are experimenting with a new software system that is designed from a much more skeuomorphic standpoint, which allows faculty and students to interact in a sort of virtual world.

Gather.town

Gather.Town is essentially a web-conferencing software like Zoom, but with the added component of seeing the virtual “room” you and others are occupying, and with the ability to move around and interact with other participants based on your locations in the room, just like real life. Users easily start and end side conversations and chats, or return to a main speaker just as at a real-world conference or other gathering. Rather than being moved to a Zoom breakout room, in Gather.town, you can simply walk your online self to tables and chairs, sit down, and start a conversation. 

Gather.town has some pre-built virtual environments targeted at educators — there is a pre-built classroom setting, a generic campus setting, a dorm, a quad, a lab.  There are also virtual representations of the MIT and Carnegie Mellon campuses, specifically, or you can create your own. Within your environment, Gather.town allows you to add virtual components and tools to your virual space, such as a whiteboard, a podium, or a specific video stream, to more fully mimic a classroom or conference setting.  (There’s also a virtual beer garden, for after class.)

Outdoor setting in Gather.town

The graphics in Gather.Town are not fantastic, but toned down enough to run on a wide range of computers with minimal lag, and once you get started the low-res graphics don’t seem to be a significant barrier to using the system.

Here at Carleton, Lin Winton used Gather.Town this semester to host a virtual poster session for her 339 students.  Of course this is normally a physical event, but this year she needed an online solution that would come as close as possible to replicating that experience for her students. Lin wanted a virtual experience where participants could talk to student authors, see a poster while the presenter was talking, easily move from poster to poster, and that made it easy to invite people outside her class to participate. Zoom breakout rooms seemed too clunky and did not meet these requirements very well, and so this event was held in Gather.town.

Lin found a pre-built conference room template that included 12 pre-defined spaces, and used that as her Gather.town environment. She deleted the 12 tables and replaced ten of them with Gather.town “posters,” which are spaces where she could upload image files of her students’ work and set them up in the virtual environment. She added each student’s name above their poster, so as the students would look around the virtual room, they could easily see who’s poster is where.

She held a class meeting in this space prior to the actual live poster session, which allowed the students to “walk around” and give poster feedback so that everyone could get used to it. She says that she didn’t give the students any instruction – they just jumped from Zoom into Gather.town. “They immediately started running around – it was chaos. The students seemed very energized by being released from their Zoom jails and able to walk around and control who they interacted with, even just virtually.” Lin reports that everyone said it was easy to figure out what to do.

Poster session in Gather.town

For the actual poster session, she added a virtual podium with a “spotlight.”  Anyone who walked into the spotlight would have their video image shown to everyone and “broadcast” an address to everyone in the room at once. Participants reported that Gather.town did a good job of replicating the “real life” experience of being able to walk up to a poster and pop into and out of presentations and conversations, and they liked being able to naturally and easily see the poster and the presenters at the same time.

For some guests, being able to walk around freely was more comfortable than dropping suddenly into Zoom rooms; for others, it was less comfortable because everyone could see their movements on the screen.

Stepping to the podium in Gather.town

Things to Consider

  • The platform is improving constantly, so the names and locations of buttons and functionality is likely to change on a regular basis.
  • It can be annoying to figure out how to save work and return to it, because Gather.town does not require you to create an account. This makes it very easy for users to access the system, but potentially frustrating for the meeting host.  
  • As of now the platform does not have searchable documentation, but the help videos have tables of contents that allow you to jump to different sections.

Lin’s Tips for Using Gather.town

  • Use the modes on the right to change different aspects of the space. Assets are just cosmetic; objects are more engaging. To delete existing things, you have to be in the right mode for that thing, then shift+click on the upper left corner of the thing to delete it. The delete corner will be grey.
  • It’s tricky getting things in the right places because everything is in units of squares. An object will be placed just below and to the right of where you click. If you misplace an item it’s easy enough to delete and retry, but you can’t drag things around to move them.
  • On the right, there’s a collapsible chat panel. You can use Global to send a message to everyone (or Local to just message the people within your radius).
  • The chat panel also shows the list of participants. You can personally block people from your view; if you want to find someone in the room, you can click Locate and it’ll draw a beeline to them for you.
  • One weird thing is that, if I’m talking to you because we’re close together, I can’t necessarily see everyone you can see. There might be people on the other side of you that are outside of my radius. This can lead to observing one side of the conversation. It’s only happened once.
  • I copied the space URL into the go.carleton service to create a short go link, which I put on the invitations. You can use it over and over.

Problems 

  • I’ve had to reload the page a few times, because my processor starts whirring and my audio (both in and out) gets unusable. I’m on a MacBook Air, using Firefox.
  • Another glitchy thing is a few people’s video windows were black on my screen, and mine was black on theirs. I haven’t figured this out.
  • Only one guest reported technical issues (they were not getting any audio output), but I think this was an issue with their machine. No other technical issues were reported.

To start using Gather.town, visit https://gather.town and create free account. The academic technology team can incorporate your free site into Carleton’s account if you decide you like what you do and want to keep it. Feel free to contact the academic technology team for more information.