TEDxVail hosts virtual TED2022 speaker series

The biggest TED conference of the year, TED2022 “A New Era”, took place on April 10-14 in Vancouver and featured dozens of speakers from all over the world. This Sunday, the TEDxVailLive team will host a virtual viewing and community discussion from 2-5 p.m. featuring select talks from 11 of the speakers at the TED2022 conference.

The free event provides a gathering space for people both in and outside of the Vail Valley community to engage with ideas from the TED2022 global conference, and then engage with each other. The event will be divided into three sessions, each featuring multiple speakers that touch on one of three organizing themes: Courage, Intelligence and Regeneration. Each 45-minute session is followed by a 20-minute discussion period, where participants will be placed together in virtual breakout rooms to share and expand on the speakers that they just heard from.

Kat Haber is the organizer of TEDxVail, and she said that the goal of the event is to connect thinkers and hopefully spark new relationships and ideas for how to apply TED2022 topics to real world action and behaviors.

“Really what we wanted to do was to inspire people to be courageous, and be intelligent, and to think regeneratively,” Haber said. “It’s building a community of ideators and thinkers and solutionaries.”

The first session, Courage, features talks from Allyson Felix, the most decorated track and field Olympian in history; portrait photographer Platon, who has photographed more world leaders than anyone in history, including portraits of every living U.S. president; and Tiana Epps-Johnson, a technologist working to make the U.S. election system more modern, inclusive and secure.

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The second session, Intelligence, starts at 3:15 p.m. following the session one breakout discussion. This category features talks from Thomas J. Oxley, founder of the neural interface technology company Synchron; Garry Kasparov, a Chess Grandmaster who is considered by many to be the greatest chess player of all time; multidisciplinary artist Holley Herndon; and John C. Mather, a member of the team that built the cutting edge WEBB space telescope.

The final session, Regeneration, starts at 4:10 p.m. Speakers include Al Gore, a climate advocate and Nobel Laureate who has been at the forefront of the global climate crisis for decades; Catherine Price, a former science journalist; Elon Musk, the co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX; and Leo Lanna, an artistic entomologist who uses photography to unveil the world of praying mantises in tropical rainforests.

The breakout discussion sessions are hosted on a platform called ohyay, which is designed to mimic the experience of physically being in a space with one’s virtual group.

“What’s so cool about it is that we have customized the breakout rooms,” Haber said. “It’s not like a Zoom, where you’re in a matrix — that’s not it. It puts you almost like you’re in the lobby of a cool hotel in Vail, or the spa, or an outdoor space. We’ve actually captured images from Vail itself, so when you’re hanging out with people in the breaks, you’re in these conversational, virtual Vail spaces.”

The ohyay virtual discussion rooms will remain open for use after the scheduled sessions close at 5 p.m. to allow people who have formed connections or started deep conversations to continue their discussion without a time limitation.

TEDxVail has been hosting community events since 2010, and Haber said that participants have given perfect ratings for multiple experiences in recent years. The next TEDxVail event is a live in-person speaker series with TEDxYouth@Vail at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater on May 22. The event will also be streamed online.

To register for this week’s TEDxVailLive event, visit EventBrite.com and search for TEDxVailLive. To learn more about the featured speakers, visit ted2022.ted.com/speakers.