Host engaging virtual poster sessions

A virtual poster session is also called an e-poster session, an electronic poster session, an online poster session, an interactive poster session, or a digital poster session and its talks, virtual poster presentations. It is used in fully virtual conferences and as the online portion of a hybrid conference. The format lets students and researchers who cannot travel present their work and get feedback, and it gives judges a way to evaluate student posters remotely.

Fourwaves virtual poster sessions are part of a conference platform built for academic conferences, so the posters come from the abstract submission form, the session appears in the conference program, and access is limited to registered attendees. The University of Zurich Cancer Biology PhD program moved its poster sessions online with Fourwaves and back to an in-person format afterward, and the University of Florida College of Medicine presents more than 500 research posters through Fourwaves at its annual Celebration of Research.

1. Presenters upload their poster. Accepted presenters upload a PDF or image poster (1920 x 1080 pixels, 16:9, is the recommended format for screens) and an optional pre-recorded video through their submission, so the organizer never collects files by email.
2. Attendees browse the poster hall. Posters are listed in an interactive poster hall where the participants viewing each poster are shown and updated in real time, along with whether a live video conversation is under way. That gives a sense of being present with others, which a list of breakout room links cannot. Attendees can zoom into a poster, read the abstract, and bookmark the ones they want to visit later.
3. Live conversations happen at each poster. During the session, attendees see which posters have people at them and join a video conversation with the presenter, who can use an integrated laser pointer to walk through the poster. They can also share their screen to show off-site material. Several visitors can join the same conversation, as in a physical poster hall, listen and ask questions.
4. Questions continue asynchronously. Attendees leave written comments and questions on a poster at any time, and presenters answer them after the live session, so time zones do not cut the discussion short. There is also a live chat for each poster for live conversations.
5. Judges evaluate posters online. For student competitions, organizers invite judges who score posters through a review form inside the platform.
6. Organizers read the analytics. Fourwaves reports poster views, conversation minutes per poster and per participant, and how many presentations each attendee visited. These analytics are exportable for the post-event report to show the impact, for example to those who funded the conference.

Live talks and keynotes run alongside the poster session through the livestream provider you already use (Zoom or another platform), with the link embedded in the program, and recordings can be published in the program afterward. Attendees who prefer their phone open the same posters, abstracts and virtual sessions from the Fourwaves conference app, which reads the same program.

Organizers who run a poster session on Zoom end up with dozens or hundreds of breakout rooms, a spreadsheet mapping posters to rooms, and no analytics. Fourwaves replaces that setup with one platform where the poster, the presenter, the conversation, and the program entry are the same object, and keeps your existing livestream tool for the plenary talks. For platform comparisons, see the virtual poster session software options roundup and Fourwaves vs Whova.