San Jose State University
The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science will host Biota 3.
SJSU is known as "The Metropolitan University of Silicon Valley".
The Contact Consortium
The Contact Consortium is the worlds premier forum and research and
development organization focused on shared virtual spaces hosted on the
Internet. From anthropologists studying emergent communities in avatar
cyberspace to educators creating experimental learning worlds, the
Consortium has been catalyzing the virtual worlds movement since its
inception in 1995. Together with NASA Ames, two Consortium special
interest groups, Biota.org and OWorld are co-hosting this event. We invite
you to visit us at our website at http://www.ccon.org and become involved
in the many events and online projects we have initiated.
Biota.org, the Digital Biology Project
The Digital Biota special interest group of the Contact Consortium is
dedicated to seeding cyberspace with biologically-inspired objects and
environments. Digital Biota is an outgrowth of several disciplines
including: Artificial Life, cyberbiology, genetic arts, artificial
intelligence, and evolutionary biology. The Biota group held its first
conference at the Cambrian fossil deposit of the Burgess Shale in Canada
in 1997. Nature can inspire the best design and witnessing the rise of
complex life on Earth compelled us to meet again in Cambridge, UK in 1998
to consider "life as it has been, and as it could be in the future." In
1999, we are joining forces with NASA Ames Research Center and the
emergent and energetic community of virtual world platform developers to
co-host Biota 3/Oworld 1 (B3O1). Why combine these two efforts? It is our
belief that the richest evolutionary matrix for biologically inspired
spaces will be in multi-user virtual worlds hosted on the Internet. In
addition, nature has a great deal to teach us about the engineering of
shared virtual spaces, from genetic algorithms for compression and
emergent properties, to ecosystems for feedback controls in dynamic
worlds, to natural ways to power the movement of structures. Lastly, a
shared space with lifelike properties and objects will be more interesting
to its inhabitants, encouraging the growth of user populations in these
worlds. For more information about our events and projects, see
http://www.biota.org.
OWorld: Open Virtual Worlds
The Contact Consortium OWorld, Open Virtual Worlds special interest
group was announced at the Biota 2 conference in Cambridge UK in September
1998. OWorld is a vehicle for the contact and collaboration between people
dedicated to the building of open, extensible virtual world platforms.
With the increased availability of protocols, APIs and 3D engines, it is
easier than ever to cook up a virtual world platform in your garage. Like
the "Home Brew" computer club of the mid 1970s which gave birth to the
personal computer, OWorld seeks to provide a regular forum for virtual
world developers, users, and application domain specialists. OWorld hopes
to create its own inhabited virtual space on the net which it can use as a
common ground meeting and experimental space. Are you the next Jobs or
Wozniak of virtual worlds, sign up on the OWorld list and tell us about
your project at: http://www.ccon.org/lists/oworld.html or see the (soon to
be launched) OWorld site at http://www.oworld.org.
NASA Ames Research Center
"In the early 1990s, a federally funded center, the NCSA, sponsored the
development of Mosaic, which became a fundamental Internet technology for
viewing World Wide Web documents and providing researchers, students and
the general public with a vast new online world. In the late 1990s, the
great potential of shared 2D and 3D virtual spaces stands poised to change
the way we learn and interact online. However, virtual worlds are much
more challenging than web documents from a technical and design
standpoint. From the 1970s, NASA has been a pioneer of 3D computer
graphics, interfaces, telepresence, modeling and simulation. From
fundamental research areas to the vast scope of sites in the solar system
visited by manned near-Earth and interplanetary missions, NASA can provide
some of the best 3D content available for discovery through the Internet.
By its hosting of the Biota 3/OWorld 1 event, bringing together developers
of open virtual worlds, NASA hopes that platforms, standards and
applications will emerge to convey some of this exciting content to the
world. Visit NASA Ames Research Center on-line.
Online Hosts:
University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory
The HIT Lab at the University of Washington has been envisioning
shared, electronic GreenSpaces since 1992 when the lab created a
functional distributed architecture for meeting in Cyberspace (built with
C, C++, OpenInventor, and ISDN for messaging). More recently, the lab has
ported their design expertise over to Java (Java 3D) and the internet. Any
virtual community is only as active as its participants are. The
technology is a far second. We've been serving cyberspace through
moderation and support of the sci.virtual-world usegroup and have seen the
power of simple, threaded text among kindred thinkers. We'll provide web
support to any group of people that thrive on virtual community. All the
better if their talking 3D, immersive, virtual environments since that's
where our hearts are when we are trying to push technology.
BangSpace Inc.
Bang Space Inc. has released Open Source code for building shared, 3D
worlds in cyberspace.
OWorld logo designed by Hunter Hadaway and Mark Stoermer, Center for Environmental
Visualization, University of Washington,
http://www.cev.washington.edu. Digital creature components made by Daniel
Kemp (modesty@io.com) using his own ALife software.
