One of the conference sessions this year focused upon electronic and non-electronic linkages used to combat hunger around the globe and to connect these disparate communities. This session included a ``virtual'' presentation by one of the authors (gmk), who was physically in Illinois during the presentation. The experiment with a virtual panelist must be hailed as an overall success, and provided many lessons for the future. The concept of a virtual conference has been adopted by the World Hunger Program, and in future years it expects to increase experimentation with international electronic participation in its annual conference.
The session was held in a lecture hall equipped with 56 Sun Sparcstation-10 workstations distributed evenly throughout the room and with a total capacity of 135 people. A telephone was patched into the loud speaker system in the classroom, and this was the mechanism for the voice presentation.
This was synchronized with a tour of the Internet, based upon a Mosaic/html document, with links from a home page to the various examples around the world demonstrating in realtime the capabilities of the Internet. A software program developed at Brown, XMX, was used to replicate the screen image of the visual presentation, simultaneously on the computer workstations in front of all the seminar participants.
During the session, a direct Unix talk session provided feedback about what was happening within the Brown seminar room. For example, this included feedback on the speaking volume and speed, and assistance in co-ordinating the timing given the Internet delays between Brown and Illinois.
