Detailed Program Book
See also the Daily Grids
and Speakers

Tracks

The State of the Metaverse

Building the New Cyberspace

No Business Like Snow(crash) Business

The Big Apps


Power to the Matrix


Culture Tranforms <Cyberspace> Transforms Culture


Standards Track

Other Conference Events

Courses
Scheduled Sponsor Demonstrations
Avatar Teleport Schedule
Public Events
BOFs, SIGs and other meetings
Out of This World Art Gallery: Exhibiting Artists

The State of the Metaverse

Grand Tour of the Virtual Landscape circa 1997
Where have we been, where are we going?
Room 2601/02, Wednesday Oct 22: 3:00-4:00pm
This panel will chronicle the early investment period in the on-line virtual worlds medium (1994-1997) and detail the notable successes and failures. The companies, strategies and the current state and future of online virtual worlds and tools will be the focal point of this session. As former Director of Design at OnLive! Technologies, Steve DiPaola will discuss the business, social, and design directions OnLive! took in developing and marketing it's internet-based audio 3D virtual worlds and software: what worked and what didn't.
Bruce Damer Contact Consortium - presenter and coordinator
Steve Dipaola, Darwin Digital / Saatchi and Saatchi
Tony Parisi, Intervista

Grassroots Virtual Community
What are the Citizens up to?
Room 2601/02, Wednesday Oct 22: 4:00-5:00pm
This session will take a close look at the virtual worlds citizenry. What are people really doing in these virtual worlds? What draws them back and keeps them committed? What are they telling us they want in their world, now and in the future?
Pascal Baudar, Cybertown, presenter and coordinator
Rick Noll, Circle of Fire Studios
Janet LeValley,
Fujitsu/WorldsAway

Building the New Cyberspace

Designing Worlds that Work
What makes a World Worth (re)Visiting?
Room 2601/02, Wednesday Oct 22: 1:00-2:30pm
This panel of experts will tackle: how do we make worlds that really draw people back. Some of the sexiest 3D worlds have a tiny fraction of the users visiting simple postage stamp avatar environments. Do you always need to be multi-user to attract visitors? Do you  have to allow users to leave their mark or otherwise build in the world for them to take ownership? How do gaming worlds compare with just plain social spaces? What about great episodic performance worlds, are they attracting viewers? Will sales-bots turn off the users or does your community need a really great bartender bot?
Fabrice Florin, Zenda Studios, presenter and coordinator
Amy Jo Kim, Naima
will talk about the importance of social rituals in the various stages of community development
Scott Moore,
Fujitsu/WorldsAway
Fred Davis, noted journalist and cyber-futurist will present Avatars, the Evolution of a New Species

 

Architecting and Managing Large Scale Virtual Worlds
Room 2605, Wednesday Oct 22: 3:00-4:00pm
Virtual worlds have been online long enough for some large scale connurbations to exist.   How do you architect worlds that can support thousands of simultaneous users? Once your world is successful, drawing gamers, socializers or builders, how do you manage the community?
Mitra, Cosmo Software, will talk about Peoplespace and other large virtual communities. He will address key factors supporting the construction of large virtual worlds including standards, and enabling technologies
Rick Noll, Circle of Fire Studios, will talk about managing AlphaWorld and the Active Worlds universe
Richard Wojcik, Boeing, discussant

2D or not 2D
That is the Question
2nd Floor, Room 8/9, Thursday Oct 23: 9:00-10:30am
This panel will feature another installment of the famous debate over the relative merits of 2D versus 2D interfaces? Does 3D just bring a lot of performance and navigation headaches? Is 2D simply not sexy enough? Do you always need to see your avatar or is first person point of view the natural way we primates interact?
Jim Bumgardner, The Palace - coordinator
Randy Farmer, Electric Communities
Mary Madaras, Fujitsu/WorldsAway
David Colleen, Planet 9 Studios


Roll Your Own Avatar 1
Avatar Physiognomy Design, Revealing the spirit within
2nd Floor, Room 3, Thursday Oct 23: 9:00-10:30am
What are the essential issues in designing and creating avatars for use in virtual worlds. Avatars must have a way of relating the aspect and character of those they are embodying. What are the mechanisms and paradigms that facilitate this? Design directors who have been creating avatars for many years, from top commercial worlds to fine art pieces, discuss their thoughts on the subject.
Steve Dipaola,  Darwin Digital / Saatchi   Saatchi, presenter and coordinator
Kirk Parsons, Attic Graphics
Mark Meadows, Construct Internet Design

Roll Your Own Avatar 2
Your Avatar and You
2nd Floor, Room 3, Thursday Oct 23: 11:00-12:00am
Stasia will open by talking about design and user customization of Onlive's avatars, abandoning the literal paradigms of reality, such as full-bodies and texture maps, to operate more as iconic representations of self, relying upon the magic of audio and lip-sync to breathe life into these totems. Another speaker, Hannes Vilhjalmsson, writes: "This session will look at the mapping from the human user to the representing avatar. Communicative behaviors including spontaneous gestures, facial expression, posture and overall appearance
will be examined. A Video from the MIT Media Lab will be screened to illustrate some novel approaches to solving these problems."
Stasia McGehee, Avatar Designer, presenter and coordinator
Hannes Vilhjalmsson, MIT Media Lab
Yannis Paniaras, Cosmo Software


Text-Based Virtual Communities and Web Worlds
But Will they want to Wear Avatars?
Room 2605, Thursday Oct 23: 1:00-2:00pm
This session will contrast the experience and communities in text based virtual worlds with their visual counterparts, what is gained, what is lost?
Sandy Stone, ACTLab, U.T. Austin, presenter and coordinator, will talk about the trade-offs of placing a visual interface on a virtual world and describe experiences her lab has gained with MUDs (notably their architecture, MUQ) and recently, hosting Traveler's Utopia community.
Other speakers TBA

No Business Like Snow(crash) Business

Friday features our venture fest of presentations on the funding of virtual communities, both with real world dollars and their internal cybercash economies.

Show me the Revenue Stream
What is your user community prepared to pay for?
Room 2601/02, Friday Oct 24: 9:00-10:30am
To sustain companies and virtual communities alike, someone has to pay, but who and how?
Nathan Wagoner, Duck Soup Information Systems, coordinator
Tony Christopher, Fujitsu/WorldsAway
Speaker from venture capital industry (TBA)

Venture Capital and Virtual Communities
Where to Invest in the New Cyberspace?
Room 2601/02, Friday Oct 24: 11:00am-12:00pm
Where will the return on investment for virtual communities come from? What sorts of assets do virtual communities represent or create? Is the relationship between the provider of the community and its members like retailer-consumer, government-citizen, club-member, or other relationships?
Adam Erickson, SVASE, presenter and coordinating
Reid Hoffman, Relationships.com

Lets go Shopping at the Virtual Mall
Is Anyone Buying It?
2nd Floor, Room 8/9, Friday Oct 24: 11:00am-12:00pm
There has been much ballyhoo about 3D for on-line retail selling. So have any of those great demonstration book, appliance, shoe and music stores actually gone online and made any sales?
Bruce Damer, Contact Consortium, coordinator
Rick Noll, Circle of Fire Studios
Other speakers TBA

Dealing In-World
Money Systems, Token Economies, Transactions
Room 2603, Friday Oct 24: 1:00-2:00pm
Virtual world token economies have turned out to be very popular ways of attracting users. From skills and weapons in gaming worlds to v-cash and apartments in social worlds, people love to play the trading game. How does one support dealing in-world and how can this turn a profit in RL (real life)?
Chip Morningstar, Electric Communities, co-presenter
Tim Lavalli,
Fujitsu/WorldsAway, co-presenter

The Big Apps

Virtual World Universities
New spaces for learning
Room 2605, Wednesday Oct 22: 1:00-2:30pm
The Contact Consortium's creation was inspired by the the success of Dr. Reed Riner's NAU SolSysSim, an award winning MUD allowing students around the world to create and "live in" simulated societies. TheU Virtual University and Nerve Garden are two projects initiated by the Consortium to pioneer the use of visual virtual worlds in learning. TheU is an Active Worlds space where an international virtual architecture competition will be held later this year. Nerve Garden is a multi user VRML 2.0 space for learning about biological and generative processes.
Bruce Damer, presenter and moderator
Omar Saleh and Haydn Kuprevich, SRT Enterprises will announce TheU Virtual University competition
Speakers from Biota.org a SIG of the Contact Consortium will demonstrate Nerve Garden


Avvywood
Avatars Meet Hollywood and Inhabit Your TV
Room 2603, Wednesday Oct 22: 1:00-2:30pm
Charanjit Sidhu writes: "Inhabited TV is one expression of the shared spaces vision, and focuses on the potential to transform passive 1:many broadcasting into a many:many participative, social experience - retaining the appeal of professional content, but harnessing the creativity and community afforded by viewer participation. I will be presenting an overview of two groundbreaking experiments carried out earlier this year: The Mirror and Heaven and Hell."
Kevin George, CyGaia talks about their MTV project
Mike Yuen, Internet Hollyworlds
Charanjit Sidhu, BT Labs, talks about their recent Inhabited TV projects (the Mirror and Heaven and Hell) done in conjunction with the BBC.

The Virtual Workspace 1
Virtual worlds for training, education and collaboration in the corporate setting
2nd Floor,
Room 8/9, Thursday Oct 23: 11:00am-12:00pm
Nathan Wagoner, of DuckSoup Information Systems will coordinate this panel and talk about a Palace environment designed to support field sales staff and training for FORE Systems.
Garry Hare of OZ Interactive will be speaking on "The Virtual Workspace", using OZ’s recently developed "Ericsson World" as an example of the types of 3D, navigable and functional community workspaces that can be developed for product showcasing, internal and external communications, retail sales and customer services. He will touch upon usability issues surrounding such an environment as well as the many features that can be included.

Richard Wojcik, will talk about Boeing's efforts to use virtual worlds to prototype business activities such as meetings, functional planning/status rooms, displays of product lines and support distance learning.

The Virtual Workspace 2
Virtual worlds for training, education and collaboration in the corporate setting
The Web and Internet in general is being enlivened by visually represented visitors. This session will focus on issues of technology, privacy, and representation in peronal and corporate conferencing using virtual worlds. Applications of virtual worlds in online consulting, e-commerce, distance learning, product training, and entertainment will be discussed.
Room 2603, Friday Oct 24: 2:00-3:00pm
Franz Buchenberger, blaxxun interactive, co-presenter
(see his extended description)
Other speaker TBA

Episodic Performance Worlds
Room 2601/02, Thursday Oct 23: 11:00-12:00am
Celia Pearce, coordinator
Other speaker TBA
Kevin Hartz, Cosmo Software

Creature Worlds
Virtual Pets and Artificial Life, killer apps of inhabited Cyberspace?
Room 2603, Thursday Oct 23: 2:00-3:00pm
Michael Powers, In3D, coordinator
Rob Fulop, creative director at PF Magic
Bruce Damer, Contact Consortium/Biota.org

Its a Kids' World
(
a special session sponsored by the CGDA)
Room 2605, Thursday Oct 23: 9:00-10:30am
Virtual worlds on the Internet are inhabited by thousands of kids. What "sucks" and what "shines" from their perspective? What can we learn from Camp Counselors and Recreation Leaders? Along with other speakers, Jm Valera will give us one high school senior's view of life in Avatar Cyberspace.
Larry Kay, Toonsmiths, presenter and coordinator
Lisa Lopuck, Electravision

Jm Valera, Tandem Computers

Avatars at Play 1
(a special session sponsored by the CGDA
)
Experiences with a Big Multi-user Gaming World
Rusel DeMaria and Alex Utterman will take you on a tour of a big, successful online gaming world: Ultima Online
Room 2603, Friday Oct 24: 9:00-10:30am
Rusel DeMaria and Alex Utterman - co-coordinators and presenters

Avatars at Play 2
(a special session sponsored by the CGDA
)
Character Based Online Gaming: prospects for the medium
This session will tackle the controversial question: "avatars: do they aid or detract from online gameplaying experiences?"
Room 2603, Friday Oct 24: 11:00am-12:00pm

Noah Falstein, Chairman of the Board, CGDA, coordinator
Ned Lerner, President, Multitude
Matthew Ford, online game designer
Johnny Wilson, Computer Gaming World


Power to the Matrix

Down at the Render Farm
Media APIs
Room 2603, Wednesday Oct 22: 3:00-4:00pm
Frederick Shaul, 3D Labs
David Frerichs, Cosmo Software
Speaker TBA

Plumbing the Underworld
Infrastructure and Protocols for Worlds: Media Streaming, Abstraction, Databases
Room 2603, Wednesday Oct 22: 4:00-5:00pm
Kevin Hartz, Cosmo Software, coordinator
Mitra and/or Jeff Close, Cosmo Software
Doug Crockford, Electric Communities

The Need for Speed
3D Hardware and Software Acceleration
Room 2601/02, Thursday Oct 23: 1:00-2:00pm
There is a disparity between the second generation of VRML browser and what many of us have become accustomed to in PC games such as Quake, Duke Nuk'em and Epic Unreal. While some 3D companies have focused on displaying accurate 3D models others have learned from the PC game market and are intent on delviering heart thumping 3D environments over the Internet. The 3D entertainment market on the PC is driving software and hardware development at an astonishing rate. In this panel session we will here from VRML software firms and 3D acceleration companies on the forefront of merging the best tricks from game programming with the latest in consumer hardware 3D acceleration. The resulting images and animation features will blow you away!
Michael Powers, In3D - coordinator
Frederick Shaul, 3D Labs
Jon Pankin, RealNet
Andy Hess and Eric Johnson, Newfire

Digital Biota
Biological Metaphor to Power the New Cyberspace
Room 2603, Thursday Oct 23: 1:00-2:00pm
See a report from Biota.org, a SIG of the Contact Consortium, on its exciting activities including Nerve Garden, a VRML 2.0 ecosystem, and Digital Burgess, Biota's recent conference on the origins and future of life on Earth. Learn about how biological methaphors could be the key to a rich experiential cyberspace of the near future.
Bruce Damer, Contact Consortium - coordinator
Karen Marcelo, Intervista
Frank Revi, Biota.org
Charles Ostman, Berkeley Designs, Mondo 2000

The Embodied Agent Character
Bartender Bots and Bouncer Daemons, what role will they play in your world?
Room 2601/02, Friday Oct 24: 1:00-2:00pm
Barbara writes: "people love characters. Fictional characters entertain us. Real-life characters bring color and warmth to every day life. Similarly, virtual worlds will become more compelling and hospitable when they are populated by synthetic characters who interact *with* us and *for* us, playing their roles with personality and spirit. I'll illustrate these possibilities with Erin the Bartender and a cast of customer avatars." Jeffrey writes: "When it comes to people, you enjoy talking to interesting ones. It's the same with bots. Would you return to a world to have a text-based dialog with a stupid robot, or an avatar with an interesting character?" You can also see his essay on bots with character.
Barbara Hayes-Roth, Extempo Systems, co-presenter
Jeffrey Goldsmith, Wordz, co-presenter

 

Culture Tranforms <Cyberspace> Transforms Culture

Virtual Environments for Healing
Can our brave new worlds make us well?
Room 2601/02, Thursday Oct 23: 9:00-10:30am
What does it mean to be healed, in the sense of whole and wholly loving, human beings? How can we use virtual selves, relationships and spaces to heal ourselves -- body, mind and soul? Who are the pioneers of cyberspace healing, and how can they help return us to wholeness? This panel looks at cyberspace as healing place, avatar as anima, virtual reality as healing art. For in its deepest promise and most profound practice, virtual reality -- as both healing modality and healing art form -- is a transformative technology with extraordinary power to make and keep us well. We become what we behold; in beholding ourselves as healed, virtual selves, we can become the selves of our deepest and most healing dreams. Could healing be the "killer application" of our digital future -- not because it kills, but because it heals?
Galen Brandt, VR performer, coordinator
Anthony Lloyd, BioControl
Tom Riess
Carrie Heeter, telepresence researcher
Tamiko Thiel, artist/engineer
See the Extended Panel Description for this session.

Roll your own Reality
Humanity Creates a New Space, Get Set to Take a Trip!
Room 2603, Thursday Oct 23: 9:00-10:30am
At the cusp of the Millennium, an unexpected frontier is opening before us: Digital Space. Going there is more a journey into the infinities of the mind than bodily carriage to the Moon. And unlike Kubrick and Clark's 2001, many more of us can take the trip. Prescient visions of Cyberspace are come to us from fiction and real experience. Today you can "jack in" to a Gibsonian, a Stephensonian, a Hollywood or a Homebrewed world. But why stop there? Digital space can support a boundless expression of the imagination. Three speakers will express theirs, giving us a yet more visions for Cyberspace: Pescean, McKensian and Ostmonian. It's going to be a very very big space, so get set for the Trip with..
Celia Pearce
Charles Ostman, Berkeley Designs, Mondo 2000
Other invited speakers TBA

Social Lifecycles of Virtual Community
Room 2605, Thursday Oct 23: 11:00am-12:00pm
Jeffery Douglas, Electric Communities, co-presenter
Gail Williams, the WELL, co-presenter
Evelyn Pine

Transcending Gender in Virtual Environments
Room 2601/02, Thursday Oct 23: 2:00-3:00pm
The panel will be about the opportunities we have to transcend gender through the medium of the internet. For the first time in recent history, the internet offers us a neutral playing ground - everyone is equal, and there are no major barriers as to what your gender is or what you look like it's about the content - the heart and soul of the matter. However, in the same breath, gender still plays out a tremendous role in our social reality, and gender is still an important piece of cyber-interactions - but how significant? And how can you trust that this avatar is really male, or this email correspondence is really female? As chairperson of the Contact Consortium special interest group WEAVE http://www.ccon.org/weave (Women Entering Avatar Virtual Environments), I see great opportunity for gender unity through the means of the internet and beyond.
Wendy Sue Noah, WEAVE and Fujitsu/WorldsAway - coordinator
Rebecca L. Eisenberg, San Francisco Examiner
Steve Silberman, Wired News
Lisa Voldeng, überbabe media and WEAVE
Nina Wakeford, WEAVE
Sandy Stone, ACTLab, U.T. Austin

The Avatar Body Politic
Community, Ecology, Democracy, and Self-Governance in the New Cyberspace
Room 2605, Thursday Oct 23: 2:00-3:00pm
A special discussion about Virtual World Cyberspace as a new constituency and a new tool for change in a world of rapidly shifting concepts of regional and national borders
Mike Sellers, coordinator and John Wentworth, CyGaia, Tandem Futures Lab, in a discussion with Former California Governor Jerry Brown

Ancient Rituals for a New Medium
Creation Myths, Rites of Passage, and Tribal Bonding in Online Communities
2nd Floor,
Room 8/9, Friday Oct 24: 9:00-10:30am
Virtual worlds in Cyberspace are relatively new -- but the art of community-building is very old, and the basic social dynamics that bond human beings into groups are timeless. As designers and builders of online communities, we can learn powerful lessons by studying the ancient social rituals that have succesfully shaped real-world communities, and applying these lessons to our own work. Now more than ever, we need to understand the pivitol role that rituals, archetypes and mythology play in community development, to give our brave new worlds some history, depth, and soul. Charles Cameron writes: "The twin poles of any human experience are mastery and mystery: I shall address the ways in which mastery of ritual and mythic formalities in game design can project the player into mystery -- into, that is, a state in which the usual concerns of the waking mind are sidestepped, and a deeper, more immersive and more creatively rewarding consciousness emerges. Time and the timeless..."
Michael Sellers - coordinator
Amy Jo Kim, Naima
Johnny Wilson, Computer Gaming World
Charles Cameron, HipBone Games

Your Avatar, Your Ident 1
Who will I be today?
2nd Floor, Room 3, Friday Oct 24: 9:00am-10:30pm
Your ident in the real world and cyberspace is becoming increasingly multifaceted. From the nom de plume to the IRC handle to articulated 3D avatars to the human cyborg, how our ident is being stretched! As you project your persona into digital worlds, you are faced with the increasingly complex issues of picking an avatar and the persistance of your identity within and across communities. You can explore the freedom of a fictional identity or cross the boundaries of age, gender, and disability. How does the avatar-cyborg frontier offer a way to learn more about yourself?

Rob Rothfab, NTT Multimedia Communications Labs, coordinator
Sandy Stone UT Austin ACTLab
Liz Randolph, virtually


Your Avatar, Your Ident 2
Who was that bot I saw you with last night?
2nd Floor,
Room 3, Friday Oct 24: 11:00am-12:00pm
Andy Best and Merja Puustinen, MEET Factory Oy, Helsinki
A design team from Finland will demonstrate a VRML 2 compliant (multiuser) world populated with AI-type robot characters which are based on "real world" types - a depressed house wife, a serial killer, a survivalist, and a lesbian princess. Preview it at
Conversations with Angels

Sociology and Anthropology in Virtual World Communities
Not Just an Avatar: Embodiment Online
Room 2605, Friday Oct 24: 9:00-10:30am
How are people are experiencing embodiment online? How are avatars and their communities connected to social life and what is the relationship of virtual bodies to corporeal ones? How does the work which virtual environment designers do in providing avatars, artifacts and communication affordances affect the self-expression of users who may interact with larger social structures of hegemony based on race, class, and gender?
Jim Funaro, Cabrillo College, coordinator
Jerry McDonough, UC Berkeley,
T. L. Taylor, Brandeis University, see pages on her research.

The Avatar Psychologists
The Construction of Virtual Personality
Room 2605, Friday Oct 24: 11:00-12:00am

The construction of Avatars and on-line worlds raises many issues as to character, behavior, motivation, goals, attitudes, and sexuality. Avatars are Imaginal representations which enable anonymous interaction between individuals in Symbolic space-like dreams. And like dreams we cannot control the space or the activities of the characters or the worlds these "Beings" inhabit. These symbolic interactions and their consequences shall be the subject of this interactive seminar.
Sanford Rosenberg, Media Research Associates, co-presenter
Yannis Toussulis, Media Research Associates, co-presenter

Legal Rights and Ethics in Virtual Communities
Room 2605, Friday Oct 24: 1:00-2:00pm
This session will consider the cultural and legal aspects of identity, the integration of intelligent machine identity into the western European philosophical and cultural tradition and other subjects regarding ethical and legal questions in a visual, embodied Cyberspace.
Carmen Hermosillo, coordinator
Mike Sellers
James Scranton, Attorney

All the (Virtual) World's a Stage
Virtual Worlds for Role Playing, Storytelling and Theater
Room 2601/02, Friday Oct 24: 2:00-3:00pm
Celia Pearce, see her essay on Narrative Environments in preparation for this session.
Mark Petrakis, Spoonman
Misty West, Miller Freeman

Standards Track

VRML Consortium 1: Avatar Standards, VH-Anim
VRML Humanoid Animation Working Group
Room 2605, Wednesday Oct 22: 4:00-5:00pm
Bernie Roehl, University of Waterloo, Canada
The H-Anim Working Group is developing a standard way of representing humanoids in VRML 2.0. This standard will allow humanoids created using authoring tools from one vendor to be animated using tools from another. VRML humanoids can be animated using keyframing, inverse kinematics, performance animation systems and other techniques.
Design goals for the spec are as follows:
Compatibility: Humanoids should work in any VRML 2.0 compliant browser.
Flexibility: No assumptions are made about the types of applications that will use humanoids.
Simplicity: When in doubt, leave it out. The specification can always be extended later.

VRML Consortium 2: Living Worlds
Living Worlds Working Group
Room 2605, Friday Oct 24: 2:00-3:00pm
Living Worlds is a standard that will enable to take your VRML 2.0 avatar, to any Living Worlds compliant world, and once there to interact with other avatars. It facilitates, the construction of worlds, objects and avatars that are independent of the technology used to network them. It is intended to remove there construction from the hands of the technology developers and put it in the hands of the creative professionals that have made 2.0 so successful.
Presented by Mitra, Cosmo Software.


Courses

Advanced VRML 2.0 Course
Cosmo Software presents these in-depth courses with newly released versions of its tools. Taught by the pros, it can't get any better than this!
2nd Floor, Pentium Lab, Room 2, Thursday Oct 23: 3:00-5:00pm
Creating Java & VRML Applicaions with Cosmo Player 2.0, Kevin Hartz, Cosmo Software.
2nd Floor, Pentium Lab, Room 2, Friday Oct 24: 3:00-5:00pm
HomeSpace (tm) for your Homepage, Todd Shafer, Cosmo Software.

Scheduled Sponsor Demonstrations

Thursday Sponsor Demos

Electric Communities
The Electric Community of the Future is Now.
Room 2601, Thursday Oct 23: 3:30-4:45pm (Single Presentation)
Extensibility... Scalability... Certification: Randy Farmer shows us how it's done, as he demonstrates the long-awaited platform for virtual community from Electric Communities. EC Habitats is a foundation and a set of tools for building community, based in secure distributed objects. Each computer functions as a server, each person, a voice.

The EC Habitats Beta Program will be announced, and the platform demonstrated with an emphasis on content creation capabilities in this new world. Stake out your turf now, secure your persistent identity, and see how creative freedom can change YOUR world. See the special announcement on the conference website.

Cosmo Software
Room 2602, Thursday Oct 23:   3:30-4:45pm
Description TBD.

NTT SOFT
Room 2603, Thursday Oct 23: 3:30-4:45pm
Description TBD.

OZ Interactive
Room 2605, Thursday Oct 23: 3:30-4:45pm
Description TBD.

Friday Sponsor Demos

Blaxxun Interactive
Room 2601, Friday Oct 24: 3:30-4:45pm
Blaxxun's President and CEO Franz Buchenberger will introduce its third generation of products, called Community Platform. Two half hour sessions will be given to allow attendees double options to attend this important presentation.

Fujitsu
WorldsAway Avatar Communities
Room 2602, Friday Oct 23: 3:30-4:45pm
Description TBD.

3DLabs
Making 3D Pervasive
Room 2603, Friday Oct 23: 3:30-4:45pm
Description TBD.

Canal Plus
Room 2605, Friday Oct 23: 3:30-4:45pm
Frederic Le Diberder
Canal Plus is running the first european virtual world called The Second World. About 6,000 avatars are living in this virtual Paris for chating, playing games, experiencing new relationships. We are working on a new version of the Second World that will be launched in the beginning of November featuring new avatars, new places, new functionality.


Avatar Teleport Schedule
Thursday and Friday, 3:00-5:00pm in room 2607
The schedule of live events in the Avatar Teleport is posted here and in the room itself. This is a room with a projector and screen showing live events inside Avatar Cyberspace. Avatars 97 is happening in the virtual realm too. Beam in to the Teleport and "jack-in" or "Avacast" to live virtual world events and witness art/performances from digital space.

See images from past avatar teleports.

This is a tentative schedule subject to change:
Thursday 12pm-5pm

Kevin George/Jm Valera/John Wentworth: Traveler/Tikkiland Cyber Auditions, CyGaia
Rick Noll, Active Worlds: ENZO’s big event: 1000 avatars or bust!
Charles Ostman displays creations from the Virtual Terraform

Friday 12pm-5pm

Kevin George/Jm Valera/John Wentworth: More experiences in Traveler/Tikkiland CyGaia spaces
Marion Breitschopf: events on the Palazzo in the Palace (live from Austria)
WorldsAway jacks-in to avatar communities
C. Scott Young, the VRML Knight presents his worlds

More detailed description of Teleport Events

VOCE or Virtual Auditions, Kevin George, and MTV presentation, teleporing with Traveler and UT Austin ACTLab together with Systems Whizzard also from Texas.

C. Scott Young spoken word performance and the Chrome Angel 97

Marion Breitschopf connecting with his Austrian Black*Box Online Community: palazzo - die virtuelle Bastelwelt

 


BOFs, SIGs and other meetings

A BOF will be held by Peter Rosen on the subject of New Schools For the
Next Millennium
. Discussion will focus on innovations in Distance Education and alternative
education employing Virtual classrooms.
Room 2605, Friday Oct 24: 5:30-7:30pm

Socio/Anthro Birds of a Feather (BOF)
Room 2603, Friday Oct 24: 5:30-7:30pm
This is a BOF for those interested in forming a special interest group (SIG) on sociological and anthropological issues and research in the inhabited virtual worlds medium. This group will provide an opportunity to discuss current research, issues, methodology and other matters related to the study of virtual environments and avatars. Disciplinary boundaries will be loosely defined so those from all related fields are welcome!

Other BOFs and SIGs will be scheduled and posted at the conference. Contact the conference office in room 2604 if you would like to schedule an ad-hoc meeting.


Exhibiting Artists

Steven Hanly
our Webmaster
C. Scott Young
Roger Zuidema

 

Avatars 97 Nav Bar
Please send any comments to our Webmaster

© 1997 Contact Consortium, All Rights Reserved.