You know, last Saturday we went to Supernova Festival in Brescia (Italy), to hold a session about gaming, VR and ImmotionRoom.

This is a very little post-mortem about this experience, with the typical Q&A structure.

We’ve already read lots of post mortems about your events (like this or this). What has this experience taught you the most? Why it has been different from the others?

Well, it was the first time that we were in front of a non-optimal audience. Supernova is a festival hold in the streets of cities, so your audience is composed by people that were passing by, students forced to be there by teachers and elderly just there because they were bored at their homes. Yes, there are also young interested people, but they’re not the majority… and that’s a great problem. The guy that was holding the speech previous to ours had an audience full of high-school students just playing with their phones. When the teachers took them away, he found himself speaking in front of all empty rows… yikes!

The location was also non-optimal for our ImmotionRoom setup: the weather was sunny and the location was an open space… and we all know how Kinect doesn’t love sunlight… :-(

So there were tricky conditions… how to overcome that? Well, as always, as I love to say in every post-mortem: sh*t happens, so keep your blood cold, think fast about a solution and solve the problems. For example, to cope with the sunny weather we positioned the Kinect so that it was influenced the less by the sunlight.

About the audience… how to handle them? Well, it’s hard talking to an audience where half of the seats are empty and where some people just randomly get up and go away. What I did was focusing on that 3-4 guys that were super-careful about my talk: I just ignored all the others… I knew that those 4 guys were listening to me, I knew that they wouldn’t have abandoned the room and so I concentrated on them. Having enriched 4 new people on how to develop with VR is anyway something very good.

Another curiosity: it is true that sh*t happens… but I wouldn’t have imagined that this sh*t would have attracted lots of flies! While we were talking a lot of flies were flying alla round us… they were very disturbing! Unluckily I have no advices on how to solve this issue, I’m sorry.

Was it useful in the end?

Surprisingly yes. I thought that speaking in a public square, with only 40 people listening to us would have been quite useless… but the truth is that it proved to be very useful because we get 3 new contacts for possible VR projects! Wow!

Every event, even the smallest one, can give you unexpected work contacts… so attend all the most possible events!

Some other good stuff to add?

Well, Brescia is a small but quite beautiful city. Maybe too much flies :D, but it’s beautiful nonetheless.

I’ve also seen for the first time a Tesla Motors car… wow, it’s really wonderful!!

Some final thoughts?

Like in every event, something has been good, and something else has been bad, but we managed in overcoming all difficulties and that’s really good! Gianni, Beppe and me did a great work and a good talk :-)

Thanks a lot to Supernova organizers to have invited us… see you at our next event!