Coffee deliciousness: Obviously one of the most important factors of a conference. What sustains the attenders through boring talks, or any talk scheduled at 2PM or 8AM? What offsets the time zones that we've all traveled and the sleep that we're losing from living out of suitcases in unfamiliar hotel rooms? Coffee. Whether it's good or not, our dependence will force us to drink it, but if it's good we'll be happier campers.
Food tastiness: When they did conference session breaks or provided meals, was it delicious? And for my ratings, a lot has to do with vegetable availability as well. Some people don't believe in any food groups besides meat and bread. I appreciate the rest of the food pyramid.
Location: Are there cool things that we can walk to go see? (Come on, we can't sit in sessions all day long for days on end.) Can I walk to get food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or are we sentenced to starve unless we order $25 burgers from room service? Conferences are lame when we're confined to the hotel the whole time.
Session quality: Are the papers snore-inducing or do they keep us on the edge of our seats? A good rating means they kept us interested most of the time and were fairly relevant to what we do.
Community: A conference with good community means that we know some people there and/or don't feel terrified to talk to people we don't know. Some of these people are just scary, but other groups seem to be a lot more open to talk to new people and less easily offended by stupid questions.
Exhibits: It's nice when we have cool toys to play with.
Travel awesomeness: I guess this has more to do with the experience than the actual conference, but still, the airports and airlines we fly on deserve some kind of rating for how pleasant/unpleasant the experience is. Public transit belongs in this category too.
Student volunteering: A good rating means that being a student volunteer with this conference was overall a pleasant experience and worth the conference registration.
Goodies: What'd we bring back in our suitcase?
The next posts will be detailing the ratings for this semester's conferences:
VR 2010
Coffee deliciousness:
Typically our lab has mixed coffee opinions. Toni likes hers sweet with lots of cream and favors a medium roast. Dr. Hodges likes his brew extra bold and strong. I like mine pretty bold too with just a touch of sugar and cream. So, we end up buying multiple blends of coffee to keep in the lab. The hotel brewed Starbucks African Kitamu, which all three of us give a two thumbs up. We gulped down countless cups of this stuff.
Food tastiness:
Session breaks were usually cookies and coffee. The cookies were huge and delicious. Breakfast every morning was bagels and pastries, which were pretty good. As far as the box lunches go, there was fruit in them. The sandwiches were good but my favorite was the veggie wrap. It had grilled veggies inside and was quite enjoyable. And the reception at WPI had awesome appetizers.
Location:
Well, yes, Waltham is a suburb of Boston, but it's a half-hour bus ride in. And, from our hotel, there was a Dunkin Donuts, a sandwich shop, and a fish place within walking distance. When we arrived there the first night our only option (besides expensive room service) was Domino's. We are forever grateful for this experience, though, because it introduced us to the Pizza Tracker.
Session quality:
Pretty good. Some papers were interesting, others were boring, I think mostly as a function of VR not being exactly what we've been doing lately in our lab group, and because student volunteering meant we didn't always get to go to the paper sessions we would have chosen.
Community:
VR is a tight-knit community because not that many people do it. We're also well-connected since we're Dr. Hodges' students and he knows everyone in VR. Toni took a picture with Fred Brooks, and we hung out with his students. Our archnemesis, Blue Eyes, who asks difficult questions, took a picture with us too. Lots of other important people there are quite approachable and kind. We like getting to know people and knowing we'll probably see them next year.
Exhibits:
If there's one thing VR people like, it's cool toys. Wide field-of-view HMDs, haptic devices, augmented reality displays, force feedback gloves...although we didn't see any olfactory displays I think most of the toys we'd ever want were there. It was fun to try them out. Demos at WPI were all right; we took our picture with a robot.
Travel awesomeness:
Flights were fine. MBTA was not, due to our four hour ride on the 70/70A bus. Oh man. Besides that one bus ride we had no problems though.
Student volunteering:
We had to wear bright red vests that were slightly obnoxious but it was okay. Sometimes too many volunteers were scheduled for a space but then we just worked it out among ourselves to take turns and not do the whole time, and the SV chairs were reasonable. Things were scheduled before we came in and everything was mostly organized.
Goodies:
Everything this year has a soldier on it that we really don't know what means. We got a flash drive with conference proceedings, so that's useful. The t-shirt colors this year were highlighter yellow and worse-than-Clemson orange. The bags they gave us were bright green. I would have chosen different colors! But hey, at least they gave us some stuff.
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