This year, the participants of the annual meeting of the Gemeinschaften in Neuen Medien (GeNeMe) were able to enjoy a real novelty: The pre-conference on September 13, 2023 was held for the first time as a “didactic double-decker” in the virtual congress environment TriCAT spaces® Congress. Title of the event: “Building bridges or creating barriers? Participation and exclusion through virtual reality in education and society”.
There were around 110 participants in the virtual meeting venue. This made it possible for the participants to move spatially largely freely and to experience a sense of community in one place.
Numerous experts from research and practice designed an exciting program.
After the introductory keynote, the participants dispersed from the virtual plenary hall into two parallel tracks. After a short break, the participants dispersed into workshop rooms and engaged in lively discussions about the opportunities, fields of application and challenges of virtual reality in the context of inclusion.
While the lectures and discussions in the morning were held by German-speaking experts, the virtual environment opened its doors to the international audience in the afternoon.
In parallel, a German-Ukrainian group of scientists conducted a workshop for the project “Ukraine digital: Ensuring Academic Success in Times of Crisis” as a virtual World Café.
Program items among many others were:
Presentation of the ongoing research project “XR-Part – Development of an Extended Reality Platform for Citizen Participation in Urban Planning Processes“, in which TriCAT is a project partner.
In the workshop “Introduction to AVILAB2/TriCAT Spaces & Mapping of the XR Landscape: Projects at the TUD at a Glance”. TriCAT is also a project partner in the AVILAB2 research project.
The central results were visualized and shared with the entire plenum in a concluding exchange in the plenum. Overall, the event enjoyed very active participation and generated a lot of positive feedback, also because the functional portfolio of “TriCAT Spaces Congress” was sometimes almost exhausted.
Image source TU Dresden/Team der Wirtschaftsinformatik – Informationsmanagement: panel discussion within the community workshop “augmented Collaboration in Trans European Communities. Joint Project Workshop of COWEB & SMART”
