In a few hours I'm off to Charlottesville, Virginia, to participate in a highly select meeting of people interested in creating QTVR panoramas of historic sites.

We're to brainstorm for the weekend, and then go home and each write a portion of a book dealing with best practices in this subject area. I know very little about any of the other participants, mostly just their names and details inferred from their email address or description, such as "photographer," which is how I'm lumped (i.e., no mention of archaeology).

None of them have participated in the World Wide Panorama shoots, and one of them had a web site that apparently showed some of his panoramas, but that page would never load for me. Thus, I'm not sure how the range of abilities and experiece of the others compares to mine, but it should be interesting to find out.

This should be a lot more fun than my last conference. It's also all expenses paid, and has been organized by the professor that I worked for in Italy a couple summers ago. It should be fairly intensive, too.

Thankfully my boss decided to allow me to attend, despite the fact that it means missing one of our college's professional development days where we here an inspiration speaker, get to know each other better, and generally work on team-building exercises. We have these a couple times a year. I attended the first one just after being hired, but missed the second because of paternity leave. Now I'm missing the third, and will miss the next one in July as well.

Anyway, I don't know how the resulting publication's going to be divided up and assigned for writing, but most likely my interest area and specialization of expertise. I may end up with sections about copyright, Panoscan machines, and workflow, perhaps even scripting and databases. In any case, we're supposed to receive an honorarium for that work, which will be a nice aspect.