We Welcome You
Inside Cyberspace and Everywhere
Avatars98
will be the first major international conference
held inside cyberspace.
In this groundbreaking event, graphical avatar
virtual worlds will host thousands of people in a cyberconference
complete with
exhibits, speakers, educational and entertainment
experiments, art shows and avatar
awards, and a debut of new technologies never seen before on the
net. At the same time, there will be dozens of physical
locations around the planet where people will gather and jack
in to this new reality. It all happens on
and around November 21st, 1998 (depending on your timezone).
Be a part of cyberspace history, sign up to attend
or be a part of the crew
in Avatars98! Want to know more?
Scroll down (or click) to check out the
• Guide to the Av98 Website,
or see
• What an Avatar is,
and
• What we mean by inside
cyberspace, or get
• Digi's Welcome,
where DigiGardener (a cyber sort of Johnny Appleseed) describes
past Avatars conferences and why this is cyberhistory
in the making.
Explore the rest of the site with the buttons at the bottom of the screen,
and use each index that comes up on the left.
Guide to the Av98 Website
This website is ground zero for:
1) your source of information on Av98 events
and participants;
2) your guide
to virtual worlds and how to attend
the conference and explore worlds;
3) our place for coordinating registration
and setup for all exhibitors, speakers,
avvy awards entrants, and volunteers.
And on the day(s) of the conference, come here for
4) your complete program guide: BigBoard!
You can get into Avatars98 a lot of ways.
• First, sign up for our Newsfeed mailing
list to stay informed.
• Next, support your local CyberCommunity: Av98 is the year's only
fundraiser for the nonprofit community organization, the Contact
Consortium (that's us :), so we hope you will consider being a sponsor.
• Then, join in: if you are a dedicated pioneer
of the cyber-frontiers, you should become a member
of our crew and build your own exhibit,
jack in your webcam, host a discussion
or event, enter the avvys or out-of-this-world
art show.
• Finally, attend!
Whole new worlds await inside!
What is an avatar?
and
What do we mean by Inside Cyberspace?
When you surf the web, send email, or type to someone in a chat room,
you are simply operating a set of interfaces. Now, what if you could
move past screens, buttons and links and enter somewhere that is more
like a place, where you could meet other people and cruise together
through fantastic virtual landscapes? Well, that place exists. Now.
Not in gloves and helmets, the gear of "virtual reality." It exists
in home computers streaming over 28K modems. It's a place called "virtual
worlds." You enter these worlds and their communities dressed in a digital
body called an avatar.
For the past two years, the Contact Consortium has celebrated
avatars by holding old-fashioned, face-to-face conferences
in San Francisco (see Earth to Avatars
96 and Avatars 97). This year
we are doing it differently. Join us November
21. Take part in history. Take part in online
spaces and physical places all over
the Earth. That's Avatars98. Together
let us make Cyberspace a place!
Digi's Welcome
Conference Chair, Bruce
Damer,
known in avatar as DigiGardener.
We would like to invite you to come with us on a wondrous
journey, a journey to a place we call a greater
Cyberspace. This is the Cyberspace of our dreams, a Cyberspace
that takes its inspiration from the Matrix
in William Gibson's Neuromancer and from the Metaverse
in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. This is a Cyberspace of inhabited
virtual worlds, worlds which will take you way
beyond the web. This is not just an interface, it is a real place!
In 1996 we celebrated the birth of a new medium with the first conference
on inhabited virtual worlds, Earth
to Avatars. Last year we met again in San Francisco for Avatars
97. This year we are ready to go the next big step and hold our
third annual gathering inside Cyberspace.
Why are we doing this? Well, holding Avatars 98 in-world
means that you and thousands of others like you can be a part of it.
We will also test drive the medium and
measure its readiness for a truly global happening in human contact.
You can also catch the buzz of face-to-face contact as there
will be dozens of physical spots planetwide
where people will be gathering to jack in
to the event.
Join the Contact Consortium, its
members and supporters, and make history on and around November
21st for Avatars98, Inside Cyberspace and Everywhere! Get
on the Newsfeed, and then sign
up today to attend, offer your support,
and become a member of our
crew to build a world, host an event
in your town, create an exhibit, or contribute
your art or avatar to the avvy
awards. Then go off and get some practice by getting
a world, and start to explore a greater Cyberspace.
Last and foremost, we would like to thank all of our hosts,
contributors and sponsors.
See you in-world on November 21st!
-- Bruce Damer,
a.k.a. DigiGardener, the "Digital
Gardener", sowing the seeds for a greater Cyberspace,
and
author of the book Avatars! |