[ExI] TransVision 2010, October 22-24, 2010

[Giulio Prisco]

TransVision 2010, October 22-24, 2010
http://giulioprisco.blogspot.com/2010/10/transvision-2010-october-22-24-2010.html

TransVision 2010 is over! I wish to thank all speakers and
participants, those who came to Milan and those who participated
remotely via Teleplace. Special thanks to Kim for her work at the main
Teleplace workstation and for handling many technical problems, and to
Cosimo and Jacopo for their work at the HD video camera. I wish to
thank the volunteer Italian to English translator (I am not mentioning
your name here because I guess you prefer it this way, but you know
who you are and thank you so much), who gave also a great unscheduled
presentation of the Polytopia Project. And of course I also want to
thank Riccardo and Stefano for their support in organizing and running
the conference. In particular Stefano should really have stayed at
home to recover from recent surgery, but he made a special effort to
be with us.

In the first two pictures, Dan Massey and Max More giving their talks.
In the foreground, the Terasem 1 O'Neill Island One Space Habitat, a
Bernal sphere model built by Simon Deering for the Terasem Movement of
Martine Rothblatt and presented at TV10 by Khannea Suntzu. The model
is now on its way to Florida to be delivered to the Terasem Movement.
We had many great talks, not only about visionary technologies but
also about literature, politics, philosophy and art. The second half
of the first day has been dedicated to Italian neo-Futurist literary
and artistic movement, but strike neo- because Futurism is always Neo
by definition. I have been disappointed by not seeing as many people
as I hoped: I counted about 65 participants in Milan over 3 days
including a dog. The problem is that participating in conferences
costs money and time, and in my own presentation (which I shortened to
less than ten minutes to make time for other speakers) I proposed
online conferences 2.0 as a solution.

We had about 30 remote participants in the in the TVirtual online
extension of TransVision 2010, hosted by the teleXLR8 project based on
the Teleplace online telepresence platform. Remote participants have
been able to watch all talks in realtime, and interact with speakers
and other participants. In the picture above, Max More's talk is shown
to remote participants in Teleplace, and the virtual Teleplace
conference hall is shown to the participants in Milan. We used two
Teleplace workstations, one to stream the video and voice of the
speaker and to interact with remote participants, and one to stream
the speaker's slides. Lesson learned: if the text on the slides is
small it is better to upload also the original .ppt or .pdf to
Teleplace. We did this in realtime during the conference, but we
should have done it in advance. For those speakers without
presentations in .ppt or .pdf, we used the second Teleplace
workstation to show the audience in Milan to the audience in
Teleplace.

In the afternoon of the second day we have reversed the procedure
outlined above and shown remote talks from speakers in Teleplace to
the audience in Milan. After great talks by Eugen Leitl and Robert
Geraci, Natasha Vita-More started her talk (picture above)... but 20
minutes into Natasha's talk all the Internet connections in the
conference hall in Milan died, perhaps due to overload caused by too
many WiFi connections in parallel. The Internet servive provider's
technicians could not fix the problem. The remote participants in
Teleplace continued without us, and we have video recordings of the
talks by remote speakers. However, all remote speakers have been
invited to repeat their talks to the teleXLR8 community.

In the morning of the third day, not only the Internet connections in
the conference hall were still dead, but also the screen projection
system was dead! I had a (very) heavy-handed "exchange of views" with
the hotel's personnel (wife says I can be quite unpleasant on
occasions), and the technical problems were fixed.

This was a very interesting event, with great talks by great speakers.
I am happy to have seen again many old friends and made many new ones.
In the picture above, some speakers and participants at a dinner after
the end of the conference. I was not really able to pay attention to
any of the talks including my own, and I look forward to watching the
video coverage. We recorded everything on video, both in HD with the
cameras on site, and from Teleplace. The videos will be available
online and on the conference's DVD proceedings. The videos recorded in
Teleplace will be available online in a few days, and those recorded
on site in a few weeks.

I have started two blog posts as containers and index pages for
material to be posted later. Both posts have the same title as this
one. The post on the TransVision 2010 blog will have links to the HD
videos recorded in Milan, and the post on the teleXLR8 blog will have
links to the videos recorded in Teleplace. The Twitter feed created by
participants at #TV2010 has the twitting history of the conference.