Impressions of Participating in the Virtual Academic Conference 2025

Are you familiar with the Virtual Academic Conference?
I recently attended the "Virtual Academic Conference 2025," held from Saturday, December 13th to Sunday, December 14th, 2025, and I would like to share my thoughts on it here.
* This is honestly just my personal impression! So, there isn't much substance to it!

1. What is the Virtual Academic Conference?

In a nutshell, the Virtual Academic Conference is an "academic conference held in the metaverse."
Looking at the website, it seems to have been held since 2019.

It primarily utilizes cluster and VRChat as its platforms.
For this 2025 event, poster sessions and keynote speeches were held on cluster, while the first day's social gathering and the second day's demo sessions were held exclusively on VRChat.

Generally, when you think of an academic conference, you likely imagine presentations and lectures limited to a specific field of expertise (though the scope may vary). For example, the Chemical Society of Japan covers "chemistry" in a broad sense, while the Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan focuses only on the "chemical engineering" domain within the field of "chemistry."
In contrast, one of the features of this Virtual Academic Conference is that it is an "all-genre" conference that includes not only information science but also humanities subjects.

2. Poster Sessions

A wide range of genres!

The 2025 conference featured poster sessions across the following 11 categories.

• Sensation and Perception

• Social VR

• Health and Medicine

• History and Cultural Archives

• Applied Mathematics and Natural Sciences

• Education

• Information Science

• Welfare

• Agents

• Society

• Visualization and Science Communication

...Just looking at this list, it's quite free-spirited, isn't it?
Perhaps because it's held in the metaverse, I had the impression that there were inevitably many presentations related to virtual reality, but isn't it rare to have a conference where both arts and sciences coexist? The participating organizations were also diverse, with a wide variety of groups participating, including not only universities but also technical colleges, high schools, and VR SNS groups. (There were even international participants... truly global!)
University students should have a fair number of opportunities to present in seminars and the like, but high school students have fewer opportunities to output their work, so being able to gain presentation experience, even if it is in the metaverse, seems like a valuable experience.

The titles and abstracts of the presentations are published on J-Stage, so please take a look!J-Stage, that brings back memories!

Reference: Virtual Academic Conference 2025 Presentation Summary Collection
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/vconf/2025/0/_contents/-char/ja

By the way, the pre-explanation video for the Virtual Academic Conference also touched on "how to write an abstract." Students who have belonged to a laboratory might be used to this, but as a Virtual Academic Conference that accepts people from various backgrounds, it is a very thoughtful approach. Some people might think, "This is common sense...", but every piece of common sense has to be taught by someone at first. High school students might find it educational to watch...?

I had one more thought about the poster sessions, and that is about the difference in poster sizes.
Usually, at real-world academic conferences, presentations are often summarized on vertical A0-sized posters, but this Virtual Academic Conference used a horizontal layout (probably 16:9?).
This horizontal layout is close to the layout of ordinary computer screens or PowerPoint slide materials. I think it is easier to create a poster if you try to compose it by arranging figures and illustrations, so in that sense, I personally felt that the hurdle for participation has been lowered.

Presentations that personally caught my attention

All the presentations were interesting, but I will pick up just a few.
As it was held in the metaverse, there were many presentations on the relationship between the metaverse and health.
For example, one presentation by a lead author from the Mie University Graduate School of Medicine compared exercise levels and sleep between a long-term group who played in the metaverse for 3 hours or more per day and a short-term group who played for less than 3 hours. Since a decrease in exercise can lead to lifestyle-related diseases, there was a discussion about whether it is possible to regain healthy lifestyle habits by devising ways to interact with the metaverse (for example, standing while playing even if wearing an HMD).
[Reference] Yuka Shirai et al., Relationship between Metaverse Play Time and Lifestyle Habits, 2025, Virtual Academic Conference 2025 Presentation Summary Collection, pp100-102
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/vconf/2025/0/2025_100/_pdf/-char/ja

3. Valuable Keynote Speeches

There were keynote speeches each night during the two-day conference. I won't go into much detail about the content as it would be long, but please watch the archives left on YouTube. (Simply put, both of them are great speakers!)

Virtual YouTuber Kakapo Kitashirakawa

The first day's keynote speech was by Virtual YouTuber Kakapo Kitashirakawa. She is a famous academic VTuber who has a PhD in physics,which is amazing.As a science communicator, she often talks about the fun of science in her streams.
As a science communicator, she gave a lecture on her worries and thoughts about how to spread the fun of science to people who have not been interested in science until now.
The lecture itself was about science, but regarding the point of "how to reach people who have not been interested in that genre before regarding your own business, activities, or hobbies?", I think there are many people who have similar worries.

Professor Eiji Irie, The University of Tokyo

The second day's keynote speech was by Professor Eiji Irie of the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. Although he has a cute avatar, he is a real university professor and introduced examples of virtual classrooms he is actually working on.
Just as working adults started working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems students were taking remote classes.
The way he conducts classes by utilizing VRChat, participating on the VR side, and making full use of ZOOM distribution was content that strongly made me feel the progress of technology. In particular, the class using gate circuit gimmicks was interesting, and it is designed so that you can move them while touching them directly as gimmicks in VR. In normal classes, you learn on paper, so it probably depends on the student's imagination, or it is common to watch videos of pre-prepared behaviors. It is revolutionary that you can understand it while moving it yourself like a puzzle...

4. Demo Sessions and Excursions

Demo Session: Experience it in VR!

Some of the participants in this poster session also introduced their work by creating worlds in cluster or VRChat.
This is a form of providing details and additional explanations that are difficult to convey orally or that could not be touched upon with just a poster.
I couldn't get around to all of them within the time, but thankfully there are archives for this too! It was streamed on Leon Zeromia's channel on the first day and Okyutan's channel on the second day, so please take a look at those. There are also worlds that hold group events regularly, so if you are interested, it might be worth going to see them?

Excursion: Discussion Meeting for Everyone

Excursion. It's a word I don't hear very often, but roughly speaking, it seems to mean an "opinion exchange meeting."
On the first day, titled "Why are you at the Virtual Academic Conference?", they talked about their motivation as presenters. From the middle, they involved the venue in a participatory discussion on the topic of "What would you like to do if you were to present?" It's not a pattern I see much at conferences I attended when I was a student... but this is fun in its own way.

The second day's excursion was a talk by university-related people titled "Between Researchers and Residents - Thinking about how to interact to grow the metaverse together." The discussion unfolded about the relationship between the metaverse and academia, including research ethics. Although it feels like a different taste because it is a conversation among people in the research field, the content is "I can't believe I'm listening to this for free..."!
I think it is important content not only for those who do research activities but also for businessmen who want to develop businesses on the metaverse from now on.

5. Summary

I ended up writing longer than I thought, but I will summarize it briefly at the end.

1. A wide range of genres!

As I wrote above, the scope is broad, covering not only the sciences but also the humanities.
I remember the term "interdisciplinary" being popular for a while (I wonder how it is these days...?). It refers to the concept of conducting research or learning across different academic fields. Since the scope is broad, it gathers opinions from many different experts, so I felt it was quite an "interdisciplinary environment."

2. This content is free...?

Most regular academic conferences require paying a registration fee of several thousand to tens of thousands of yen (at least that was the case in the field I was in). And yet, the Virtual Academic Conference is, believe it or not... free!
As you can see if you watch the archives of the keynote speeches, demo sessions, and excursions, there are many active academics involved, and frankly, the quality of the content is high.

In conclusion

As a working professional, I think the environment and awareness of "working remotely," such as telework and working from home, have changed rapidly over the past few years. I had imagined that the academic field might be following a similar trend.
It was in that context that I encountered the Virtual Academic Conference. I envy today's students for having an environment where such learning is possible while staying at home...
As platforms, cluster, VRChat, and YouTube are all free (there are various opinions on this, but they are free).
Why don't you all try participating, even if just to listen?