It was the Thirty-Third Annual Conference of Particle Physics, but it was the first to be held on Meeting Cloud, the most popular virtual meeting place on the web. Despite the fact that most particle physicists considered themselves on the tip of the cutting edge of modern science, they lagged well behind in some of the more technological aspects, and many scientists had staunchly opposed the Meeting Cloud concept as a matter of principle: why study science at all if you don't get an occasional trip to Geneva?


The "ballroom", therefore, reflected the inverted hierarchy that had been inadvertantly created by attempting to infuse such a high-tech meeting concept into such a technologically backwards group of theoreticians and modellers. The avatars of the young scientists were visually appealing and technically complex, reflecting hours of wasted programming and use of the more social crossover platforms such as the sports platform ThunderCloud and the popular dating site, Cloud9.

Conversely, the senior scientists were represented in the virtual room as coarse, pixelated shapes with very little detail and even less expression-tracking. Their complex, meandering questions and highfalutin utterances seemed to emanate in a disembodied way from the center of their drab, emotionless avatars. Talking to them inevitably resulted in the same mild feeling of discomfort experienced when trying to meet the eyes of a person wearing sunglasses.

Most of the professors and senior researchers had the standard first-level avatar: a featureless three dimensional person with an uploaded head-shot stretched over where the face ought to be. The professors clearly had not grasped the concept that the uploaded image was meant to be cropped to the edges of the face. Many of them had uploaded photos with several people in them, creating the illusion of many-headed monster avatars. Professor Chung-Hee Kim had chosen a photo where he was looking up, causing everyone he met to involuntarily follow his gaze, even when they knew that the picture was static. Bill Corning, the neutrino expert out of Haverford University, had an advanced avatar that resembled him almost exactly (minus about ten years, his colleagues remarked unkindly). It was even outfitted with a dynamic suite of real-time emoticon expressions, but everyone knew that he had forced his graduate student to program it for him, so it seemed less impressive. Sasha Ivanov, who studied hadrons, had programmed a very impressive face, but the whole avatar was only a bust, which made him seem like a floating, decapitated head. He was distressed to discover that he would not be standing behind a podium during his talk. Chang Li and Herb Walker and several others were still walking around as large, three dimensional question marks due to their complete inability to grasp the avatar creation dialog. This irritated the conference organizers, but a semi-transparent text box that floated just above each person's head made them more recognizable than any name tag had ever managed, even despite their failed avatars.

You are cool.
» middaymoon on 2010-09-24 12:51:40

I could totally see this happening in the not-so-distant future...
» randomjunk on 2010-09-24 08:43:33

Google
Join their deep space research department. hahaha

pi to one? That's a terrible ratio. BUT ALSO AWESOME

I think I can get some photoshop for free from school too, actually. I don't know if it has to be my major or something, though. And I could always buy my own version later. Good idea!
» middaymoon on 2010-09-25 11:30:15

Crazy Maddness
» Midnight on 2010-09-25 06:23:08

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