CREDIT: BEN SCOTT
THE FIRST PODSTER. There you are, standing by your poster at the big annual meeting, when the Big Kahuna in your field walks up. If only you had some multimedia to make a quick impression. Next time, try attaching some video iPods to your poster, says graduate student Pascal Wallisch of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who unveiled what may be the world's first "Podster" at October's meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia.
Wallisch got the idea after a poster session at the 2005 neuroscience meeting in which he used his laptop to show videos of his research on the primate visual system. Reaching around to point at the screen was awkward, however, and the batteries ran out. So this year, he replaced the laptop with two iPods, each loaded with videos to explain different features of his experiment. It gave visitors a more interactive experience, he says, and left his hands free.
Passers-by loved the concept, says Wallisch, as did two Apple Computer reps from a nearby booth--until they found out he'd used a Microsoft product to create the poster's text and graphics. "Then they just left," Wallisch says.
