ABOUT AVATARS 2001

Bruce Damer
(digigardener)
 

Bruce Damer here (known "in world" as DigiGardener, the Digital Gardener) calling all avatars to join us on a real CyberSpace Odyssey: AVATARS 2001. This will be our sixth annual Avatars event, starting at the ANA Hotel in San Francisco back in '96 and moving fully into Cyberspace in 1998. This year we are pushing the envelope again with new technology (bots like you have never seen them), new platforms (the brand new Adobe Atmosphere and a bigger better Avvy Awards.

This year we have four platforms participating, Active Worlds (www.activeworlds.com) with their citizens' whimsical parody treatment of Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Traveler (www.onlive.com) with really cool voice-powered Avatars2001 spaces, The Palace (www.thepalace.com) with their annual 24 Hours on the Palace event dovetailing into AV2001, and our newcomer, Adobe Atmosphere (www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere), with an interplanetary journey to the new worlds in the Atmosphere galaxy.

So I would like to invite you, on behalf of our wonderful AV2001 team, to participate as an exhibitor, contributing artist, webcam streamer, speaker, social volunteer, builder, avatar maker or just plain participant. We hope to see you in the various event worlds over the weekend of December 1-2nd, 2001. Watch these pages for a Schedule of Events over both days.

Bruce Damer
Co-Director
Contact Consortium (www.ccon.org)

Bruce Damer is a Principal and founder of DigitalSpace Corporation and a founding director of the Contact Consortium, Silicon Valley-based organizations dedicated to the development of multi-user graphical virtual worlds on the Internet. The Consortium has an extensive individual and institutional membership and hosts several conferences and colloquia annually on topics of advanced virtual communities and their applications. Recent Consortium projects include a 3D virtual town (Sherwood Forest), a virtual university and architecture competition (The U), a virtual garden world (Nerve Garden), development of virtual learning spaces (Vlearn3D.org), the Digital Biology Project and Conference (Biota.org) and a global cyber-conference: Avatars98, Avatars99, and Avatars2000. Bruce's company DigitalSpace Corporation builds virtual world platforms and content and creates innovative spaces for such clients as NASA (a virtual habitat on Mars) and Adobe Systems Inc. (Adobe's Atmosphere community).

Bruce is a graduate of the University of Southern California and has a career background in software engineering having built some of the original personal computer GUI systems based on the Xerox Star workstation. Bruce lectures extensively around the world including a recent tour for his book "Avatars". Bruce's writings and work have appeared in numerous scientific journals and received coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times, Leonardo, CNNfn, CNET, Suddeutchland Zeitung, Ars Electronica CyberArts, 3D Design, SIGGRAPH, COMDEX, Info World, Knowledge Management, and elsewhere. He is currently developing a "real" cyber-community on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains known as the Digital Garden. Bruce is also a member of the staff at the SFSU Multimedia Studies Program, and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory. A more complete bio on his life and work is at: http://www.damer.com.