Long before Covid, the Presentation Summit dabbled in virtual. One of our industry’s most prominent spokespeople lives in Japan. Garr Reynolds is a professor of Communication Design at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka and our fall timeframe does not allow him to travel to the States. So in 2010, we piped him in to our main ballroom. We rigged up Skype and the best camera and microphone we could find at the time, so that we could see him, he could see all of us, and he could field questions from the room.
“I was a wreck,” remembers conference host Rick Altman. “When people ask me, across 20 years of hosting the Summit, what was my most stressful experience, it’s this! Every time there was any pixelation or latency hiccup, I freaked out.
“I compare that with what we do now, as a fully hybrid event, and I laugh. That was the precursor to modern presentation, and it was Garr who helped us blaze that trail.”
