Interactive virtual poster sessions
In this video, Joel Rosenfeld conpares his experience at two different online conferences.
► He describes the fist conference as disappointing because he wasn't able to establish any of the connections that he had hoped to be able to establish through the workshop. In his words:
Speakers come, give their talk, and then "poof", they're gone.
► He then proceeds to discuss another online conference that he attended, with special attention to a certain poster session that was organised in a particularly creative way. He calls it "that spacialspatial chat thing" (I don't know the official name). It's really hard to describe the setup using words, so I won't describe it here${}^\dagger$ and thus force you to you watch Joel Rosenfeld's video. He says:
I initially thought that this virtual setting was absolutely ludicrous.
But later, he says:
It turned out to be a lot closer to a regular poster session than I had anticipated. Being able to isolate yourself from the rest of the room and talk to somebody made a huge difference as far as having one-on-one conversations.
And finally:
Honestly, it was surprisingly effective. [...] At first, I thought this was a circus. [...] It was better than most of the other conferences I've been to. [...] This added a whole degree of interactivity and engagement that I didn't really think was going to be possible.
${}^\dagger$If someone could edit my answer to include the official name of the "that spacialspatial chat thing", it would be great.