I immediately thought of business travel as well. Project us all in to a virtual conference room and give us a suite of collaboration tools to use while we're all there.
The only thing missing is the after meeting drinks and dinner, but there will inevitably be services to put us all in a restaurant/bar environment, pipe in some bar white noise, have food sent from a local restaurant, etc. for an "in-person" virtual happy hour...
That "the only thing missing" is the main reason to go to many conferences.
A lot of people (those with less social desire/social skills) seem to resent it, but it is true: Networking and casual technical conversations that happen afterhours are the draw for many technical conferences. Talks can be good, and occasionally there are well-constructed lab sandboxes. But mostly, it's going and speed-dating with peers and sales teams to talk about your needs and architecture, and building a good web of contacts.
I also believe fully remote technical/collaboration work, without any periodic physical meetups, will be awful for a lot of people. Sure, those who bought into it pre-pandemic prefer it, and that's fine. But I really think there is concern to be had for the fraying of social bonds and teamwork that can be done, even (or especially) with people you have a tough time working with.
Yeah, the last year has shown us that streaming videos with some side chat is the easy part. Heck, maybe it's even better than in-person a lot of the time. I can re-record stuff when I screw up and do some things I can't do in front of a room of 50-100 people.
And it's even good that people who just go to sessions for the content will be able to do so--for a lot less money and effort. But I'm planning to go back to in-person conferences as soon as possible.
A seemingly obscure feature of meeting in person or visiting a vendor at their own offices, it offers a chance to peak behind the curtains, to feel social cues that are hard to explain/justify. There’s a lot of bulls*t in the corporate/smb world.
> there will inevitably be services to put us all in a restaurant/bar environment, pipe in some bar white noise, have food sent from a local restaurant, etc. for an "in-person" virtual happy hour...
I honestly can’t believe this still sounds fun to anyone after a year of Zoom dystopia.
The last year has shown pretty clearly that for presented content, video works pretty well. Heck, it maybe even works better along with live chat than in person. (And, to be honest, for big events I would often watch live streamed keynotes rather than crowding into a conference center with 5,000 of my closest friends anyway.)
But everything else about virtual conferences has completely sucked and anyone running events is aggressively trying to get back to in-person. (With a hybrid component for presentations.)
The only thing missing is the after meeting drinks and dinner, but there will inevitably be services to put us all in a restaurant/bar environment, pipe in some bar white noise, have food sent from a local restaurant, etc. for an "in-person" virtual happy hour...