Virtual Chair is a service that produces virtual and hybrid academic conferences, building online venues for organizers and staffing them during the event. Its home page says it makes producing an online or hybrid event easy, and it invites organizers outside academia to contact it too. Pricing is set per registrant across Basic, Standard and Premium tiers, with lower per-registrant rates for multi-day events than single-day ones; every tier includes a venue built by Virtual Chair, server space and fees, and live virtual attendant booking, while events with audiences larger than 500 or with free or discounted registration are asked to contact it directly.
According to its company page, founders Jason Hartline and Nicole Immorlica led their field's virtual transition team in spring 2020, converting the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation into a virtual event. The team adopted 📝Gather Town for its physical metaphor and, in the company's words, built the first conference fully integrated on the Gather platform; that formula became Virtual Chair. Its services span designing the venue from templates or custom builds, handling registration, collecting posters, videos and submissions, training organizer teams, and providing live help attendants. It manages 📝Zoom setup, records and edits live talks, and integrates with Gather, Zoom, SlidesLive and MiniConf. Hybrid events can add broadcast-quality cameras, microphones and an AV team. It also runs an Organizer Seminar Series in which organizers present postmortems of recent hybrid events.
Key Features
- Rotating poster sessions — Poster session rooms rotate so presenters become the audience.
- Plenary rooms — Rooms for keynote talks, sized to the event's audience.
- Sponsor booths — Sponsor logos hung in the venue, or booths placed for attendees to engage with.
- Social areas — Networking spaces with activities from giant Sudoku puzzles to board games.
- Live virtual attendants — Experienced live staff at the event to help attendees.
References
- https://www.virtualchair.net/