[FOSDEM] virtual presence "stands" on FOSDEM

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 7:05 PM Kristoff <kristoff at skypro.be> wrote:

> I do not know how exactly FOSDEM plans to organise their event, but
> would it be possible for standholder that hold a virtual online presence
> that weekend to get a place on the official FOSDEM website?

d'y'know... it was after reading books like Snowcrash and Idoru 12
years ago that i had a strong feeling, a vision, of "online chat
forums" taking place instead of in a 2D flat website, in a 3D "game"
like "reality" instead.  your virtual avatar would wander about and
allow you to select the "conference" or the etc. etc. you get the
general idea.  then about 6 months ago i saw reports that many
(floundering) VR companies looking for an excuse for their technology
had seen a surge in uptake on exactly this theme, as businesses
worldwide try to recreate real world business interactions, online.

of course the next step would be to actually see if someone has done
exactly that as an open source platform, and oh look, wow, incredibly,
they have:
https://www.openspace3d.com/softwarelogiciel/

it even has the ability to put in "chat" and you can, if you want to,
play videos etc. etc. and display *real* (live) web pages *inside the
3D virtual world*.

i put forward, kristoff (et al) that it would seem that the logical
natural answer to your question would be to... well... actually
*recreate* the entirety of the Brussels University *as* a 3D model
(because it is what people are most familiar with for the past NN
years) and to actually allocate "real" (virtual) stands *in* that
space.

with participation multipliers that i heard about from redhat's first
virtual conference multiplying attendance from 5,000 to 20,000, if
that's applied to FOSDEM *and* it's cool (the whole idea of several
tens of thousands of free software developers participating in the
same 3D online conference, come on, that's gotta be cool), it strikes
me that there should be a huge number of people available who might be
willing to pitch in and make the entire FOSDEM experience properly 3D
virtual, and use libre/open software to do so.

l.