Two virtual conferences start this coming week of October 5th:<\/p>\n
I’ll “attend” both, since they’re both free to me. I’ve never been to SCA – animation is not something I know all that much about (hand-wave about skinning, morph targets, IK, simulation – you now know all I know), but the virtual format gives me an excuse to dip in, especially for the keynotes. The NVIDIA GTC conference has lots of ray-tracing related talks, so I’ll tune in for them. GTC is free to those with .edu and .gov email addresses (and NVIDIA employees).<\/p>\n
SCA is also using Discord, like I3D did, and they kindly provide a short introductory video on how to use it. Even without registering, you can download and watch most of the full paper presentations right now<\/a>, if you like. During the conference itself, 3-minute summary videos will be played for the papers in a session and then discussion will commence. I’ll be interested to see how this format feels. My attention span is short, as is everyone’s (20 minutes<\/a> is about the absolute maximum), but 3 minutes I can do.<\/p>\n I admit I’ll likely be multitasking, listening and watching only when something catches my attention, so probably will absorb only a small bit of what I’d get if I attended in person. I’m also unlikely to do my homework, reading the papers and watching the presentations, as I’ll mostly be lurking. That’s one advantage of physical conferences: You’re there, and so are “forced” to pay attention. Yes, you can fiddle with your phone or laptop in a “real” talk, but it’s a bit rude and unseemly – why are you even attending? (Well, the answer is, for single-track conferences, that you went to the conference for three sessions in particular, but have time to blow during the other five sessions. I don’t have a great answer for that problem, and admit to the same – it’s hard to pay attention for 6+ hours each day.)<\/p>\n
![these *** times<\/a> and try things out! Figuring out what makes a virtual conference work well and gets people engaged is going to be important for about the next year, sadly enough. But it’s also a chance to find what works well, uses people’s time most effectively and efficiently, and how people who can’t afford the time or money to attend a physical conference can still stay informed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two virtual conferences start this coming week of October 5th: SCA 2020, about computer animation, starts Tuesday October 6th NVIDIA’s Fall GTC 2020, about, well, NVIDIA stuff, starts with a keynote at the end of Monday, October 5th with sessions in earnest the next day I’ll “attend” both, since they’re both free to me. I’ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5433"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5440,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5433\/revisions\/5440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/erich.realtimerendering.com\/images\/in_these_old-timey_times_bingo.jpg\"){kind=link}