Mixing virtual and physical participation: The future of conference attendance?

The rapid advancement and ubiquity of social virtual environments is bringing geographically distant users to interact as if they are in the same physical location, leading to the emergence of new application areas that adopt virtual environment technologies. In this article, we present our experiences of enhancing The 3rd International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE 2010) by virtual environment technology to allow participants to attend remotely. Based on a survey conducted with both the virtual and physical participant, we find that virtual participation is a valuable addition for conference hosting, but informal social interactions may still be missing and require further support.