March Guest: Bruce Damer

We're happy to welcome Bruce Damer as a guest author on Terra Nova this month.  You may know of Bruce already, but below is a brief bio with links.  We're really looking forward to Bruce's posts this March and to some lively conversations.

Twelve years ago, Bruce founded two organizations, the Contact Consortium and DigitalSpace Corporation. The Contact Consortium was the first nonprofit organization supporting the virtual worlds/avatar industry in its early adopter phase. The Consortium held a dozen conferences on the medium and its special interest groups explored the use of these worlds in learning, biologically inspired spaces, architecture, cyber-conference events, and much more. DigitalSpace developed a successful for-profit business in building content and hosting events in virtual worlds platforms and has been funded by NASA for the past six years to develop an open source platform for 3D simulation for space mission design and training.

In the 1980s Bruce was one of the first people to bring a graphical user interface to the PC platform when he built the Elixir Desktop while working as the chief technologist at Elixir Technologies which went on to launch the product worldwide with Xerox Corporation. Bruce and his wife Galen Brandt (an early pioneer in live motion avatar performance and medical uses of virtual environments) married in 2003 and live at Ancient Oaks farm where you can see pigs, one of the world's greatest collections of vintage computers in the Digibarn, and "get on the bus" NoFurthur and design vintage cyber-tech clothes (for when you will wear your avatar).

And here's a recent C|Net interview with Bruce, where he discusses playing Maze War back in 1974.  You can find much more (including pictures) at Bruce's website.

Comments

[steve]

1.

Welcome, Bruce! From Steve (In Search of the Valley).

[Jerry Paffendorf]

2.

Bruuuce!

[ron meiners]

3.

Hey Bruce! Welcome...

There have been some great contributions and conversations here, and very much looking forward to your joining in.

[magicback (Frank)]

4.

Welcome, Bruce.

Looking forward to reading your contributions to TN.

Frank