Rob Fulop
PF Magic

Rob Fulop has been a leading designer of consumer interactive media for 15 years and has developed titles for ten platforms. His early games for Atari and Imagic sold over 5 million copies. Mr. Fulop designed and produced two feature-length interactive movies, including the infamous NightTrap. For America Online, Mr. Fulop developed the highly successful Rabbit Jack's Casino. As Creative Director of PF.Magic, he oversees design of the company's products. He is known for the invention of the computer pet.

Frederick Shaul
3D Labs

Frederick is Program Manager for 3Dlabs, designers of of state of the art 3D silicon for professional and pervasive computer graphics. A veteren in the computer industry, Frederick has experience gained from over a decade working on projects including: 3D graphics at Compaq, and multi-media at Commodore Amiga, and real-time systems with Allied Signal. In 1996 he was awarded most valuable 3Dlabs new employee. More recently Frederick has been responsible for technical coordination and direction for 3Dlabs' public relations events, coordinating customer and software vendor business opportunities, and championing 3Dlabs' technology for emerging applications. Areas of particular interest include: 3D authoring, emerging 3D internet communications and visualizations technologies, and VRML. - the emerging standard for cross-platfrom 3D data visualization.

Noah Falstein
Chairman, CGDA

Noah Falstein has been creating computer games for over 20 years (and has made a living at it since 1980). With a career spanning numerous interactive genres and platforms, he held various roles in companies including Williams Electronics, LucasArts, and Dreamworks Interactive. Currently he runs his own freelance design company, The Inspiracy, with clients including Dreamworks, Disney, and JVC.

Lisa Voldeng
überbabe media

Lisa Voldeng moves fluidly through the worlds of entertainment property creation and technology development. For the past seven years she has worked as a technical information designer for firms such as Hewlett Packard, mFactory, Oracle, and Netscape. She operates as a consultant (read: hired gun), designing instructional material for needy technology companies. Aside from technology, Lisa is a painter, writer, and filmmaker. She recently synthesized her work in these converging arenas into überbabe media, her recently established entertainment and technology company. überbabe media is focused on the design and development of intelligent, innovative, engaging media properties for delivery across traditional and emerging channels, and the software tools and expertise necessary for the
creation of such properties.

Sanford Rosenberg
Media Research Associates

Sanford Rosenberg, Ph.D. The President of MRA, Dr. Rosenberg has twenty years of experience in working with film, video, and emerging technologies. He has consulted with a number of producers on a variety of media projects including film, television, etc., and recently served as the chair of the New Media Committee of APA's Division 46 of Media Psychology. He specializes in the evaluation of the relationship between story, structure, symbol, image, language, emotion and the dynamic unconscious.. Previously Dr. Rosenberg has consulted on the implementation of psycho graphic research in the entertainment industry. In addition to being a licensed psychotherapist, educator and researcher in the area of symbolic processes; he specializes in emerging technologies and the social/clinical impacts of these new media on consciousness, attitude ,belief, opinion, and human behavior.

Yannis Toussulis
Media Research Associates

Yannis Toussulis, Ph.D. Dr. Toussulis is a former director of the Consciousness Studies Program at Antioch/West University, a current Program Coordinator for the International Institute of Professional Studies, and a Project Coordinator for Media Research Associates. He has over twenty-five years experience in designing and presenting innovative programs and seminars in Comparative Mythology and Religion, Psychology, and Cultural Studies. His particular specialty is post-modern logic of inquiry and twelve years experience in qualitative research design.

 

Michael Powers
In3D Corporation

Michael Powers is President and CEO of In3D Corporation, a 3D internet content company specializing in virtual world publishing. He is also the author of How to Program a Virtual Community recently published by Ziff-Davis Press, a division of Macmillan. He considers himself a "content technologist," firmly believing that the programming content contributes as much to the success virtual worlds as the visual and audio design. Michael taught for four years in the San Francisco State University Multimedia Studies Program where he developed two avatar courses - Designing Online Communities (c.1997) and Developing Interactive Characters (c. 1994-1997). He has held positions at many Silicon Valley companies involved in multimedia and virtual world design including Xerox, Xerox PARC, DEC, Kaleida Labs and daVinci Time & Space.

 

Misty West
Miller Freeman

Misty West is Manager of the Web Design & Development Conference (www.web97.com). She handles curriculum design, speaker recruitment, and other webthink events year round -- an experiment in physical-world community design. Her primary passion in online worldbuilding is the story behind it where all spaces in the physical world give voice to their creators, some are built to that purpose far more than others. She is working toward new kinds of stories within the virtual environment, optimized for breadth of territory, multiuser interaction, and the new forms of community evolving online.

Prior to investing in the physical world web community, she was a Producer & Technological Evangelist at Worlds Inc, leading teams at Worlds' in-house studio to design and build 3d multiuser environments of all sizes and descriptions. Her academic background in fiction writing and personal background in the digital realm led her through several other high-tech startups -- one in virtual reality gaming, one in programmers' editors built as teaching tools, and one in VRML entertainment, among others. She also did a good bit of freelance technical writing for net-related and multimedia concerns, including vivid studios and Now What Software, and has been published both online and in print.

Chip Morningstar
Electric Communities

Chip Morningstar is one of the founders of Electric Communities, a cyberspace design and development company. As their Chief Scientist, he has been the lead architect of the communications protocols and object technology which Electric Communities is developing to facilitate commercial and social interaction over computer networks. He was also heavily involved in the initial development of Fujitsu's WorldsAway service, for which Electric Communities provided creative and technical oversight. Prior to joining Electric Communities he was the Vice President for Software Development at the American Information Exchange, where he managed the development of the AMiX online information marketplace. Before that, he worked at Lucasfilm Ltd where he was the designer and project leader for Lucasfilm's Habitat, the world's first large scale commercial multiperson online graphical virtual world. He has also worked as an image processing researcher, programming language designer and backwoods grocery store manager. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and a high school dropout.

 

Edward Lerner
Multitude


Mr. Lerner was recently selected by the Red Herring Magazine as one of the "Top 20 Entrepreneurs" in digital technology. Lerner founded Multitude to establish Collaborative Play as the next major gaming platform. Lerner's early work with Electronic Arts helped invent the 3d game business. His company's 1990 invention of the texture mapping game established the modern look of computer games. Over the last 15 years Lerner has created games with sales over $125 million. www.multitude.com

 

Kevin George
CyGaia

Kevin George is the founder and president of CyGaia, a company specializing in producing virtual worlds and the characters and events within those worlds. His credits include, MTV's Tikkiland, a virtual cyberspace, where kids from all over the world can join together and talk in their own voice and ABC's Monday Night Football Virtual Sports Bar . In collaboration with Phil Harrington and Paul Godwin, VOCE , where people worldwide can join remotely and sing with groups of people locally. Kevin is currently teaching Advanced Animation at San Francisco State University.

 

Mike Yuen
Internet Hollyworlds

Mike was one of the first VRML 2.0 artists featured on Silicon Graphics Inc.'s vrml.sig.com.  He demonstrated the first cinematic animation using VRML 2.0 at Siggraph96. He createdn the first 3D navigation tutorial for Intervista's WorldView 2.0 browser. Mike Yuen has designed VRML games for many entertainment properties including Spawn, The Fifth Element, Hard Rain, The Titanic and Xena: Warrior Princess. Mr. Yuen has been a speaker and judge on VRML design and was selected by Animation magazine as a CGI Rising Star.

Mary Madaras
Fujitsu

Mary Madaras has nurtured a keen interest in online communites and communications since her undergraduate study at Santa Clara University (BA Communications) and at SFSU's Multimedia Program. Quickly realizing the potential of emerging special interest groups, communications, and learning taking place on the internet at school, she seized the opportunity to work with Fujitsu's WorldsAway technology, the premiere virtual world software & community building program thriving today as Dreamscape. She has also spoken at WEAVE, a group dedicated to bringing forth the creativity and talent in "women entering avatar and virtual environments."

Having worked for Fujitsu for nearly three years, she has seen the WorldsAway Team grow from its early stages in world development, management, and community support into what it is today. This has given her a unique perspective on online community and what makes one tick. Mary combines her background in member support, remote staff leadership, and computers with her interests in website production and online events to help maintain two WorldsAway forum communities currently on the web. 

Tony Christopher
Fujitsu
Tony Christopher Is Executive Director of FSBA's WorldsAway Product & Services Group. He is responsible for product management, online service operations, marketing and sales. Mr. Christopher has spent over 15 years in personal computer industry product management, marketing and management roles. At Apple Computer in the early 1980's, he was the original product manager for the AppleLink online service. He was a division marketing manager for Scientific MicroSystems and has consulted on marketing programs for PC industry companies including 3COM, Novell,Aldus and Apple. Mr. Christopher holds a Bachelors of Arts degree from Columbia University and a Masters degree in Business Administration from Stanford University.

Janet Richardson LeValley
Fujitsu
Dr Janet Richardson LeValley holds a Masters degree in Sociology from University of California and a PhD in East-West Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco. She taught Cognitive Development at California State University Hayward before accepting her current position, in 1995, developing avatar community and cultural direction for Fujitsu's Dreamscape, a WorldsAway technology virtual world.   Dr LeValley regularly presents research, workshops, educational television segments and community lectures. Her most recent publications are "Constructing and Engaging Virtual Body-Mind in an Interactive Animated Cyberspace Community" (1997, 6th International CyberConf, Conference Proceedings, Oslo, Norway) and "Doing It in Cyberspace: Cultural Sensitivity in Applied Anthropology" (1997, Anthropology of Consciousness Journal, 8:4). Dr LeValley is also on the faculty of Greenwich University (Hilo, Hawaii), an international distance education university, where she is currently developing MA and PhD degree programs in Computer Mediated Consciousness. Her eddresses are: DrJanet@compuserve.com and jrichards@fsc.fujitsu.com. Her website is located at: http://ourworld@compuserve.com/homepages/drjanet

 

Scott Moore
Fujitsu

Scott Moore has been envisioning computer-generated alternate realities since he first read Larry Niven's Dreampark. Currently, he is [Grand Poobah] of Dreamscape, a WorldsAway avatar virtual community which has been open to the public since 1995. He combines his extensive background in historical re-enactment and customer service with a keen interest in cultural evolution to help build and grow a world where communities take root and thrive. Scott holds a BS in Electronic Engineering with a minor in Phliosophy, but still has not decided what he wants to be when he grows up.

 

David Colleen
Planet 9 Studios

David Colleen is known as the cyber architect who released the first virtual city on the Internet. David is known for his practical, 'real world' approach to 3D content for business and entertainment. His company, Planet 9 Studios, has produced over 100 VRML worlds for companies such as Intel, Toshiba, Microsoft, Fujitsu and others.

Kevin Hartz
Cosmo Software

Kevin Hartz is the product manager for the Cosmo Player, at Silicon Graphics. Mr. Hartz has a BA & BS from Stanford University and a Masters from University College, Oxford. He first became involved in Virtual Reality while at the Smith Kettlewell Research Laboratories through studies of the ocular-motor system of the brain. Mr. Hartz came to Silicon Graphics by way of Intraware, a start-up in Orinda, Ca.

 

Jerome McDonough

Jerome McDonough is a doctoral candidate at the School of Information Management & Systems at U.C. Berkeley. His dissertation research focuses on the construction of identity in graphical, computer-mediated communication systems, and draws on both feminist and social constructionist theory to examine the ways in which the designers of CMC technologies are involved in the representations of self created by users of those technologies. Mr. McDonough has also assisted in the development of the Cheshire II information retrieval system under the direction of Prof. Ray Larson (SIMS-UCB), and has served as an advisor to the Library of Congress on the development of an SGML format for USMARC bibliographic data standard. http://lucien.sims.berkeley.edu/jerry.html

Jeffrey Goldsmith

Jeffrey Goldsmith <http://www.sirius.com/~wordz> is a journalist, a translator and a fiction writer. He has been a writer on wide variety of interactive projects, from a interactive tour of San Francisco's Chinatown to an animated show for MSN. He has written for various magazines including Details, Wired, Heavy Metal, and also for The Site. He has developed characters for Neuromedia, Visible Interactive, Black Sun, Wild Brain, Gravity, Animatek and others. He is currently finishing a novel.

Hannes Vilhjalmsson
MIT Media Laboratory

Hannes Vilhjalmsson [http://www.media.mit.edu/~hannes] is a doctorate student in the Media Arts and Sciences program at the MIT Media Laboratory where he is a part of the Gesture and Narrative Language research group [http://gn.www.media.mit.edu/groups/gn]. His focus is on embodiment in virtual spaces, both for humanoid agents and avatars. In particular he is looking at the role of the body in initiating and sustaining a conversation.

Hannes received his MS degree in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT in spring 1997. His thesis, titled "Autonomous Communicative Behaviors in Avatars" [http://avatars.www.media.mit.edu/avatars], stresses the importance of appropriate non-verbal behaviors in face-to-face interaction and explores ways to automatically animate some of these cues in avatars, drawing from existing literature on human behavior. Before coming to MIT, Hannes finished a BS in Computer Science at the University of Iceland and had been working for a few years as a programmer and consultant, specializing in graphical user interfaces and scientific visualization.

 

Frank Revi

Frank Revi has a multidisciplinary background in architecture, theatre, engineering, and design. He holds degrees from MIT in Architecture and Building Technology, has worked for 9 years designing performing arts facilities, and has maintained active interests in photography and computer graphics. This background has led him to the field of information visualization. His current work integrates his design background with the technologies of VRML and java. He co-authored TetraHedonism, an award winning interactive VRML application, and is part of the Biota development team. Frank is an independent consultant, living in San Francisco.

 

Omar N. Saleh

 Omar N. Saleh is co-founder, President and CEO of SRT Enterprises, Inc. a full multi-media development company serving especially the Radio, Television and Satellite Broadcasting industries along with Educational and Religious markets on the Internet. Since its establishment in 1989, SRT Enterprises, Inc. has grown into a thriving leader of interactive technology that has gained an international reputation for services including Web Development and Webcasting as well as Interactive Chat. SRT Enterprises was recently described as "One of the few true Systems Integrators available". This title summarizes the company’s driving focus to combine technologies into practical and profitable packages for clients to use. SRT Enterprises’ virtual university, The Campus, merges the strength of The Palace graphical chat software and streaming audio over the Internet. Complete with live radio stations and online DJs, The Campus is a destination site for devotees of the academic, athletic and social aspects of college life – young and old alike.

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