Dave Blackburn's report from the Electronic Cafe International Event (Santa Monica California)

I would like to thank you and all of the wonderfully talented volunteers of the Contact Consortium on
organizing and executing the Avatars 99 Conference.

As a speaker on the Electronic Cafe International Track of the Avatars 99 Conference, it was a pleasure to be a part of this seminal Cyberspace event. Our Hybrid combination of live webcast audio and video with the
real-time 3D avatar inhabited Activeworlds chat environments was a unique and powerful medium to experiment with. The Avatars 99 Conference was the perfect venue for announcing my scientific explanation for the strange phenomenon of the flyng Rods.

For the last 8 years, I have actively participated in a wide variety of activities in the realm of VR development.
My participation in the Avatars 99 Conference was exciting and fullfilling. You and your colleagues are
inventing the future of online communictions, and your annual conference again provided a template for the
very best in creative global collaboration.

I look forward to many more years collaboration with the Contact Consortium, as we all continue to grow the 3D cyberspace of our dreams.

Kit Galloway has some video of the days events at ECI. I am sure he will be sending a dupe of it to you soon. Hopefully the chat in room #2 was archived.

Best Regards,

Dave Blackburn
President, Virtual Ventures

Rasalgethi's report from the University of Paris 5 Event

From Rasalgethi (Claude Lattaud <latc@math-info.univ-paris5.fr>)
Thu, 09 Dec 1999

For the event we had ~100 people for conferences, ~70 for the discussions and ~50 for public manipulations.
There was no problem during the conferences with the computers :), and each presentation was very clear for the public.

The discussion was really active and some interesting ideas was discussed :

• (natural) life could be considered as a part (a sub-class) of a global concept of Life ?
• avatars are virtual extensions of real people, could we imagine real extensions to virtual (and artificial) entites (like robots) ?
• in Virtual Worlds, some people like to create clubs, groups of discussion, could we imagine in the same way the creation of groups of virtual creatures that don't want to integrate avatar of humans in their ranks (creation of virtual clans) ?

In the manipulation phase, people discovered Active Words, the 2nd World and Cryopolis (from cryo-networks) and they liked a lot to discuss with other people in the other side of the world... several guys told me that they wanted to install the 3D Engines of these Virtual Worlds at home :).

To conclude, many people told me that they liked a lot this event and they learned a lot about Virtual Worlds and ALife. Personnaly, I think it was a success too :).

Just one thing about the cyber-talks : I guess we must think about what happened when I came in vdr1 ... the chaos, maybe we must find some solutions about discussions with a large public. I mean, in the reality,
when a person takes the word and asks the speaker for something, other people (by respect) let the first one speak alone. In VW, it's not possible because we cannot see when a person wants to speak... so if 10 people want to ask a question in the same time, the 10 questions will appear in the chat box, and the speaker (or the moderator) cannot give answers (or with great difficulties)... what do you think about this ? Any idea ?

Well, I think that's all :), if you need other precision, told me.

Else, I put online the slides of 4 conferences (on 5) at my av99 site :
http://www.math-info.univ-paris5.fr:80/~latc/av99/

Bye,

Claude