Preparing poster materials for Gather Town

If you are participating in a poster session in Gather Town there are a few things you should do to prepare your poster. First and foremost, familiarize yourself with the app since it is probably very different from other social conferencing tools you are used to.

Note: These instructions are a general guideline. The organizer of your poster event may have additional requirements.

Poster sessions in Gather Town take place in a special room with poster stands set up in a grid pattern. Your poster will be assigned to a specific location in the room. Visitors who are nearby your poster can join your private space to engage in a discussion.

There are two main things you can do to draw people's attention to your poster. First, there is the miniature thumbnail image of the poster on the poster board. It is very small and low resolution so it cannot show any details, but a few words may be legible. Second, there is the poster preview that pops up when people are nearby. It is a bit larger and more suitable to give an overall impression of the poster. For example, it could show the title, your name and some interesting images. Once people press “x” they will view your poster full-screen.

The event organizer will ask you to prepare the following files for your poster session:

The full-screen poster - Landscape orientation will probably work better than portrait, but you should play around with what works best for your poster. The Gather Town app will scale the image accordingly and will add scroll bars if necessary.

• Minimum resolution: 1000 pixels wide and 600 pixels high
• No transparent background (it will become black)
• File size: 3MB max
• File type: PNG or JPG (PDF not supported!)
• File name: [your-id]-poster-full.png

Poster preview popup - (Optional) The popup box has a wide aspect ratio (433:100). The image will be scaled so that the width fits the popup box. It shows the top part of the uploaded image and will add a scrollbar if there is more vertical content. If you do not provide a preview image, a scaled down image of the main poster will be used.

• Minimum resolution: 433 pixels wide and 100 pixels high (for ideal aspect ratio without scrolling)
• No transparent background
• File type: PNG or JPG
• File name: [your-id]-poster-preview.png

Poster stand - (Optional) The stand includes the poster thumbnail, the poster board backdrop and the square semi-transparent private space in front of the poster stand. The dimensions are very strict, since it must fit exactly in the allotted space in the Gather Town room. You can use one of the existing default images as a basis for your poster stand, and just edit in your own poster: green black blue orange purple red white lime. If you do not provide a poster stand one of the default images will be used instead.

• Include two variants of your poster stand: the regular version that all visitors will see & the “active / highlighted” version that nearby visitors will see. The active version typically has a yellow border around the poster to indicate that it can be interacted with.
• Exact resolution for entire poster stand: 96 pixels wide and 160 pixels high (or 160 pixels wide, if your organizer allows XL poster stands)
• Max resolution for poster miniature thumbnail: 80 pixels wide and 48 pixels high (this just fits on the poster board)
• The lower part of the poster stand (where the private space is) must be semi-transparent
• File type: PNG
• File name for regular poster stand: [your-id]-poster-stand.png
• File name for active poster stand: [your-id]-poster-stand-active.png

Create a zip with the four files and send it to the event organizer along with your assigned (group) ID. The organizer will then upload your poster to the assigned location.

An example of a prepared poster, poster preview and poster stand with thumbnail can be downloaded here.