One such event was the Faculty of Law’s recent virtual open house for incoming students, which we hosted on the platform Gather.
Our team built a virtual gaming environment for student associations, professors, administrators and legal research centres. The event was even more successful than we could have hoped, with a peak of 190 concurrent attendees over the two-and-a-half-hour session.
The open house was initially planned for Zoom, as in 2021. But we believed that the time had come to innovate. Holding yet another virtual event where people “interact” through squares on their computer screens was no longer an option.
Gather allows organizations to create completely customizable event spaces. We used one of its helpful templates and split the event into two components: a keynote speech and addresses from professors, and then a meet and greet session.
Incoming students could log into the platform, customize their avatars, enable their cameras and microphones (if they chose), and virtually walk around the space. We embedded images from faculty and student associations, built private spaces for students to have closer conversations with associations and created a video link in a virtual auditorium for attendees to watch the keynote talk live.
The event ran without any serious issues. Our tech support team dealt with the majority of glitches and troubleshooting. We delivered the professors’ remarks through a YouTube stream with the help of Restream (a live broadcasting application) and then facilitated the meet and greet.
Gather is fantastic for this kind of virtual environment. When people move closer to each other their cameras and microphones are activated, and they’re deactivated when they move away. This creates the feeling of being in person, with conversations happening organically as people pass each other or meet in spaces with similar interests. The ingenuity of Gather’s design and the dedication and creativity of the Common Law Tech Innovation team made it all work.
Vice-Dean David Wiseman believes that this is an exciting time for technology such as Gather. “A key benefit to using virtual platforms is their ability to reach wide audiences. We had more attendees at our virtual Open House on Gather than we could have for an in-person event.”
We should all pay close attention to the many available technologies for our new bimodal world. It doesn’t always have to be for serious use — it can be for fun and games, too!
Ryan Mosoff is a third-year JD student and a member of the Common Law Tech. He was project lead for the virtual component of the open house.