Abstract:  During the pandemic I helped design ohyay (https://ohyay.co), a creative tool for making and hosting highly customized video-based virtual events. Since Fall 2020 I have personally designed many online events: ranging from classroom activities (lectures, small group work, poster sessions, technical papers PC meetings), to conferences, to virtual offices, to holiday parties involving 100’s of people, each time creating a custom virtual environment for each. In this talk I’ll describe first-hand observations about the technical and *social* challenges of building engaging virtual experiences, and why I feel attitudes about the viability of these experiences are mistakenly shaped by trying to recreate/approximate reality instead of treating virtual gatherings as a new medium that requires content creators, event planners, and participants to adapt behavior to its strengths and weaknesses. I’ll highlight successes from the past couple of years, point to new opportunities, and discuss hard challenges that the field of virtual gathering continues to struggle to overcome.