I’m really excited that we opened a call for proposals today for Augmented World Expo (registration opens February!).  Our edgy conference on augmented reality has morphed into the world’s first Expo about the augmented world.  If you loved ARE you are going to find Augmented World Expo the most important event of 2013, and if you never got a chance to attend before register early to reserve your spot!

“The way we experience the world will never be the same. We no longer interact with computers. We interact with the world. A set of emerging technologies such as augmented reality, gesture interaction, eyewear, wearables, smart things, cloud computing, and ambient computing are completely changing the way we interact with people, places and things. These technologies create a digital layer that empowers humans to experience the world in a more advanced, engaging, and productive way.

Augmented World Expo will bring together the best in augmented experiences from all aspects of life: health, education, emergency response, art, media and entertainment, retail, manufacturing, brand engagement, travel, automotive, and urban design. It will be the largest ever exposition demonstrating how these technologies come together to change our lives and change the world.

Registration will open in February.”

1) Like most of us I wear a lot of hats. And I frequently work under a designer title. But recently someone said to me, “So you’re a Reality Architect.” I found the suggestion intriguing in part because I have been thinking about what it means to have agency in the algorithmic landscapes of the future that Kevin Slavin describes in his awesome TED talk, How Algorithms Shape the World. And, Reality Architect, if it implies anything, it implies a lot of agency and that is very appealing. But what does a “A Reality Architect do?”

2) When a very brilliant friend came up with this tag line for me, Tish Shute, Reality Architect, “She puts the reality back in Augmented Reality,” I began to become quite enchanted with the idea.

3) My career began with motion control photography creating visual effects for film and television. The Motion Control era which includes Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Terminator, Star Trek, 2010, brought us many of the early design fictions for augmented reality.

4) With the arrival of smart phones I focused on the mobile local experience and making AR a reality. I co-founded Augmented Reality Event and ARWave – a completely open federated, realtime updating system for geolocated data of any sort.

5) But the AR dream has a dark side. This is a still from Keichi Matsuda’s great dystopic vision of AR’s future. Kevin Slavin pointed out in his talk, Reality is Plenty Thanks, that AR as visual layers over reality can obscure what is best about reality rather than enhancing it.

6) Recently I have been exploring what it means to make reality more interesting. Meet Gatsby is a location aware networking startup that I love. Gatsby orchestrates small world moments and creates contextually aware opportunities and serendipity in real life.

7) But we already have experts at making reality more interesting they are called Reality Stars. And when I say I want to make reality more interesting, I have no ambitions to be a reality star. Technology and Story telling are my passions.

8) OKCupid is a startup that has been making reality more interesting and solving dating problems with a combination of data, math and story telling.

9) We are entering a new area of social intelligence where people and algorithms are interacting in interesting new ways. OKCupid has been getting a lot of attention for offering social intelligence that can help us play better in our dating lives. And by connecting social graph, interest graph and location Meet Gatsby hopes to creates new opportunities in our daily activities beyond dating.

10) The combination of math, data and story telling is also a key to a new era of corporate intelligence. Quid works with Government and big corporations, “augmenting our ability to perceive this complex world,” to help them make better decisions on big questions in a complex world.

11) Sean Gurley of Quid at Strata NY described understanding complexity as a dimensionality problem. And, where the dimensionality reduction powers of Math meet the human powers of visualization and story telling powers of people is where insight arises. This is where I think, perhaps, the work of a reality architect emerges. An alternate title for a Reality Architect might be a Data Story Teller?

12) There is also a new space of personal intelligence emerging. Quantified Self, Self Tracking and Start Ups like, MyMee – that transforms “symptoms into empowering data,” are giving us new tools to understand ourselves and unravel pressing problems like allergies that frequently leave Drs drawing a blank.

13) Moodscope adds the power of sharing and benchmarking to the personal intelligence equation. “Lift your mood with a little help from your friends?

14) I am beginning to realize I know a lot of Reality Architects. Brian Krejcarek from Green Goose is designing simple fun sensors that turn everyday things into opportunities to play and give us new ways to play life together and be happier people.

15) There is also an interesting community of practice emerging around Habit Design, Nick Crocker demonstrates in, Floss the Teeth You Want to Keep, that there are a bunch of little hacks that exist to improve your ability to change.

16) The wonderful designer Asye Birsel through her project Design the Life You Love (the illustration above is one I did from her recipe) is teaching us organizing your life is not unlike other design problems. If you can visualize it you can change it.

17) With everyone carrying a powerful sensor device in their pockets, the World is Now a Platform for Story Telling. HipGeo keeps track of your movements and then spits out a slick, animated travel diary. Narrative Science is a company that among other things can turn excel spread sheets into compelling stories for executives.

18) But to return to design fictions again. One thing interesting about the HUDs in Iron Man is the emphasis on dialogue, and the sentient portion of the HUD as a character. The Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence is increasingly directed at the interaction between algorithms and people. SIRI, for example, has a more highly developed character than Google voice. So the Aesthetics of AI is something I think aspiring Reality Architects might want to be think about and will probably play a significant role in future job descriptions and job titles we are yet to think of.

19) There is lots more I could say particularly about the importance of agency and putting people at the center of their data – please check out The Locker Project. But here are some thoughts on what I hope Reality Architects will do.

Create tools (not just maps and visualizations) to make reality more reliable, more constructable, and more useable.

20) Build technology that helps us live extraordinary lives. Situationist is an app that “injects our present lives with the unexpected.”

21) Create more opportunities, for serendipity, and fun in our daily lives. And last, but not least, never forget the potential of the phone toss!

Thank you @chrisgrayson and @kellyhadous for organizing TEDXSiliconAlley – great work!

Interview with Vernor Vinge

Tish Shute: Many of the pioneers of the emerging AR industry who will be speaking at, and attending Augmented Reality Event, consider “Rainbows End” one of their key inspirations. [Note: If you want to attend ARE2011 readers of this post can use my discount code TISH295 ($295 for two days, or for one day only TISH1DAY11 for $149]

What is the best and worst, in your view, about the way Augmented Reality is emerging from science fiction into science fact?

Vernor Vinge: Progress that sets the stage:
The worldwide market penetration of cellphones in the era 2000-2010 was of a size and speed that would have counted as foolish implausibility even in science-fiction of earlier times. More than half the human race suddenly had access to knowledge and comms. Being in the middle of this firestorm of progress, we can’t really judge ultimate effects, but I expect that smart phones and the empowering aspects of social networks and AR are still massively underhyped. (This is not to say that individual innovation enterprises can’t fail; the treasure is there for those who dare, and ultimately the whole human race can benefit.)

But I can still whine:
Some — mostly political/legal — issues are disappointing. These affect AR but also the broad range of our progress with technology:
o Software patents and some styles of cloud computing are blunting the ability of average people to innovate. In the 2010-2020 era, average people should have the building blocks to empower them to create (and throw away at the end of the workday) tools that in olden times would have been the whole purpose of a business startup.
Unfortunately, some companies restrict and compartmentalize their releases like we’re still living in the twentieth century.
There are also some mostly tech issues that I’m impatient with (speaking as a never-satisfied consumer and fan:)
o The low pixel counts in contemporary head up displays.
o The poor position coordination in current HUDs.
o The lack of mass market acceptance of HUDs.
o The lack of progress in distributed store-and-forward between
mobile devices (sub-femtocell, ad hoc and transitory forwarding).
o The lack of progress in uniform solutions to centimeter-scale
localization.

Tish Shute: What do you feel will be the most impactful application of AR in people’s everyday lives?

Vernor Vinge: There are nebulous and fairly high likelihood answers: AR apps that let each person/team see those aspects of physical reality that are important for their current activity. Pointing technologies that coordinate with that AR vision. The combination is a revolution of interfaces, and the probable physical disappearance of more and more of the gadgets that twentieth century people associated with high tech.

There are also more specific, spectacular, and necessarily uncertain impacts (that depend on social acceptance and the development of network infrastructure for consensual sharing of local imagery).
o Economic disruption of the trend toward huge, expensive display devices.
o Bottom up social networking, arising from GPL’d tools. I see this as very disruptive, in good, bad and arguable ways, as illustrated by descriptive terms such as “consumer protection clubs”, “belief circles” and “lifestyle cults”. Some of these could be as public as our topdown social networks. Some might be quiet and widespread, perhaps growing out of pre-existing groups that already have a lot of intermember trust. (See:http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/C5/index.htm)
o More farfetched, but in the tradition of the last 50 years: the digitization of external visual design: building architecture could give less priority to physical appearance and more to cheap physical strength, network access support, and physical modifiability.

Tish Shute: I interviewed Bruce Sterling earlier this week – http://www.ugotrade.com/2011/05/06/augmented-reality-transitioning-out-of-the-old-fashioned-legacy-internet-interview-with-bruce-sterling/.  And, I’m really looking forward to your “fireside chat” with Bruce at the end of Augmented Reality Event to sum up the event [see the full schedule for ARE2011 here].  But was there anything that particularly rung a bell for you in my conversation with Bruce?

Vernor Vinge: Bruce says:  “… it’s pretty clear that the people who would weep for joy to have Augmented Reality are people whose reality is already damaged. People who need reality augmented as a prosthetic …” This really rings a bell with me. And social networks with AR may have a special impact at small sizes, even just _two_ players. At such a scale, they might be better called “joint entities” than “social networks”. For example, two differently disabled persons, where one is mobile. There’s a lot more that could be said about this, including applications that could be done (maybe are being done) already.

Picture via IEEE Spectrum: Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

Tish Shute: As Jesse Schell pointed out last year at ARE2010, “The whole point of AR is to see things from a different point of view … How can there be a more powerful art form than one that actually changes what you see?”

The magic lens of the smart phone, screens – large and small, projection, audio and sensory devices are mediating our AR experiences today. Bruce pointed out last year in his opening keynote, that these less immersive forms of AR have their own merits.

But eyewear has always been integral to the big vision of AR. Do you see some interesting futures for AR without eyewear? And, How long before AR eyewear is part of our everyday lives?
Vernor Vinge: This importance of vision is a visionist claim :-), but for the majority of us who have sight, binocular vision is by far the highest bitrate input we have, and we have enormously sophisticated wetware for analyzing what we see. Current display tech is far short of fully exploiting this input channel.

Along the way to this goal, I expect we’ll pass through mini-eras of exploiting the best-available tech. Right now, that is the tablet and the smartphone. Sometimes I almost wish for slower progress: in the nineteenth century, you could profitably spend your tech lifetime mastering one mechanism (for instance, black-and-white silver halide photography). The whole world would benefit from your career. Now, we rattle through the mini-eras so fast that we never fully exploit what’s zooming past before we’re on to the next stage.

How fast (or if) HUDs like in Rainbows End show up will probably depend on network and localizer tech as much as the HUDs themselves, with clear generational differences within such eyeware. In fact, it’s fun to imagine the mini-eras you could get with different combinations of HUDs tech, localization, and networking.

(Aside, a quibble: I think AR should not be restricted to visual only. There are tactile and kinesthetic possibilities, at least.)

(Aside, a whine: If only we had an output channel with the bitrate and flexibility of vision! Wearables plus voice and gesture could do some of that. Going further might involve scary human re-engineering. In Fast Times at Fairmont High, I speculated that a small re-engineering (eidetic memory) could give a form of highrate output,
simply by allowing selection from very large menus.)

Tish Shute: Augmented Reality and Ubiquitous Computing are intimately connected. Is a distinction between AR and Ubicomp still useful? (This recent PARC blog post: http://blogs.parc.com/blog/2010/03/defining-ubiquitous-computing-vs-augmented-reality/ takes a look at the definitions.)

Vernor Vinge: In a literal sense there is a distinction, and there is enough technical challenge in AR to justify specialists spending all their time with AR. But Augmented Reality’s importance to humanity is in its role as a portal to the power of ubicomp and human cooperation.

Tish Shute: Augmented Reality, as we understand it now, is a human centered experience. But even now some of the most important aspects of our lives are governed by machine to machine intelligences that operate for the most part beyond the reach of human perception, e.g., the trading bots of Wall Street. What role can augmented reality play in better mediating between human intelligence and machine to machine intelligence? Does AR hasten the arrival of the technological singularity?

Vernor Vinge: I see four or five concurrently active paths to the Singularity:
a) Artificial Intelligence: We create superhuman artificial intelligence in computers.
b) Digital Gaia: The worldwide network of embedded microprocessors, sensors, effectors, and localizers becomes a superhumanly intelligent entity.
c) Internet Scenario: Humanity with its networks, computers, and databases becomes a superhuman being. (Bruce’s story “Maneki Neko” is a beautiful and subtle illustration of this possibility.)
d) Intelligence Amplification: We enhance individual human intelligence through human-to-computer interfaces.
e) Biomedical: We directly increase our intelligence by improving the neurological function of our brains. (I regard this last item to be the weakest of the possibilities.)

AR is central to progress with possibilities (c) and (d).
If we humans want to keep our hand in the game, AR is an important thing to pursue.

Tish Shute: Powerful computer vision apps are emerging for smart phones and face recognition technologies are beginning to appear in consumer apps. Do you think we need a major shift in the way we handle data ownership? And, is “there is a real risk of our augmented reality world being owned by interests which are not our own?” (see my conversation with Anselm Hook last year. http://www.ugotrade.com/2010/01/17/visual-search-augmented-reality-and-a-social-commons-for-the-physical-world-platform-interview-with-anselm-hook

Vernor Vinge: Yes, there is such a risk. (See also my political/legal comments in response to your question (1).)
More broadly, I see DRM and the Law being used to reify our intellectual heritage as permanent private property. If this could work, it would be the biggest grab in history — and a major roadblock on human progress.

But even setting aside all the open/closed/free ideological questions, there is another important issue here: anytime laws are passed making popular and easily accomplished behavior illegal, things get very ugly. It may seem frivolous to compare this to the first stages of the War on Drugs, but that’s where serious enforcement would lead.

Tish Shute: We have seen gestural interfaces go mainstream in the last year. What are the most interesting innovations with gestural interfaces that you have seen in recent months? What sessions will you go to at ARE this year?

Vernor Vinge: I’m way behind the curve as to what is happening right now. Collecting data points on real hardware and applications is a high priority for me in attending ARE 2011.

Tish Shute: Are you reading/writing any new fictional literature about AR? And/or, What design fictions for AR are most interesting to you in the moment?

Vernor Vinge: As to writing: My novel The Children of the Sky should come out this October from Tor Books. It’s set in the far future and is the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. Alas, the story has only indirect connections to our present technological interests.

As to reading: I got a big kick out of Daniel Suarez’s duology Daemon and Freedom(TM).

Imagine an L-System forest, a herbivore simulation and a carnivore simulation all developed separately without each having its own graphical front end. Each object in the separate simulations would communicate locally or via the network using some agreed upon protocol. Next, picture one or more 3D front end “view portals” with all the bells & whistles that visualize what is going on in the engines and traffic, putting any local “area” together into a coherent scene.

If it existed, such an A-life system could be run as a true grid, an “Evolution Grid” or “EvoGrid” if you will, with the computation not limited to one processor or one 3D scenegraph’s rendering step clock. Developers could focus on their areas of strength while the quality of the collective simulation grid would improve much faster than any one individual effort. And perhaps best of all, new developers could connect their engines, protocols or view portals into the grid or take up development of existing engines and protocols so that no projects need stagnate or die. So with this vision in hand, is something like the EvoGrid possible, workable, desirable, and doable? (Bruce Damer, 2008)

When Bruce Damer told me he is working on evolution technologies (ETs) that will come “alive” towards the end of the 21st/beginning of the 22nd Century, I pricked up my ears!

A world renowned guru of our digital past and future (see of Bruce’s projects at his personal page Damer.com and his Digibarn Computer Museum), Bruce is in the advance guard of many emerging fields, including: social visual computing – avatars and virtual worlds (see his book Avatars, 1997 and compendium of Avatars events); NASA research – surface robotics, spacecraft and mission design, agent-based modeling, and real-time physics (see DigitalSpace for space projects from 2000-2008); and, artificial life – cellular automata, complex and emergent systems (see Biota.org and the Biota Podcast with Tom Barbalet).

Bruce Damer’s architectural notes for the EvoGrid router, a finite state machine that will consume XML

EvoGrid – an evolution technology grid

Bruce envisages a grid (EvoGrid.org) in which current work on artificial life research being done with teams at NASA, universities, and in the artificial life developer community, e.g., the work of Ventrella (see below), can interact in a common ecosystem.

Bruce plans to build EvoGrid on an open source framework, communication grid and protocol (Zhengyou & Yichuan 2004) allowing future developers to extend the EvoGrid and add their own objects or virtual creatures.

By running the simulations without visuals, the evolutionary algorithms of EvoGrid will be able to develop huge populations that can interact with other large populations evolving in real time. But, with their emergence into the social visual 3D space of a virtual world, they will hit the wall of physics.

The public 3D immersive portal into the EvoGrid will support the simulated evolution of biologically inspired forms. The portal will be a virtual space where they will interact with human users.

This window into the human world raises many interesting questions. Will the algorithms/artificial life forms themselves decide when to emerge into the public eye? Or, will they be pushed out by other life forms, or summoned forth by human voyeurs/god(s)?

But, regardless of how artificial life algorithms eventually emerge into cyberspace, this will be an important step in exploring the far reaching implications of the possible emergence of artificial life from algorithms into atom space.

From Algorithms to Atom Space

J. Doyne Farmer defined a living thing as a pattern in spacetime, able to reproduce itself using a stored information blueprint, employing an internal metabolism driving interdependent parts to interact with and deal with a chaotic environment. Above all, he put forth that a lineage of living things also possesses the ability to evolve through time (Farmer & Belin, “Artificial Life: The Coming Evolution,” 1991).

Our world and ourselves are products of this collective natural technology (whether one believes it is guided by an unseen God or not). Others have argued further that human culture, whether it is in the form of writings, music, ideas and the arts also employs some of the same underlying methods to spread and evolve (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 1986). Therefore, beyond the physical laws of nature, the most powerful force shaping the universe is what we might call “evolution technology.” (Damer 2008)

The picture above is from Jeffrey Ventrella’s website.” JJ Ventrella is a programmer-artist doing virtual world design and artificial life research. He was Principle Inventor and second co-founder of There.com, and most recently, Senior Developer at Linden Lab. “Ventrella writes papers and chapters on topics centered around evolutionary computation and creativity.”

Ventrella is also the creator with Brian Dodd of Darwin Pond.

Darwin Pond is an imaginary gene pool, a primordial puddle of genetic surprises. More technically, Darwin Pond is an Artificial Life Simulation: a virtual world exhibiting the emergence of life-like behaviors. But it’s more than just a fun and informative thing to watch, you can participate in this artificial life simulation by building scenarios and setting up experiments.

What are the possibilities for artificial life?

Evolution technology is the use of the principles of evolution as seen in nature to rapidly develop new software, chemicals, genes or materials, devices or full robotic machine systems.

Bruce is developing EvoGrid to ask some big questions about our future: Can simulation be used to deduce how life came about? Can simulated biological environments be used to create powerful and transformative technologies? Can artificial life evolve into semi-living machines that can clean our atmosphere and heal our bodies?

“Evolution is a powerful tool,” Bruce notes. It can be used in constructive or destructive ways. “We should use it to make tools – the mechanisms by which we will survive and thrive.”

When our bodies are married to this kind of technology we may live for hundreds of years.

Bruce sees the next generation of space exploration emerging out of these artificial life forms born in cyberspace.

They should be able to work in actual hardware – intelligent manufacturing done at the lowest molecular level.

If we are truly going to travel and live beyond the earth’s biosphere we have to go beyond the 19th century technology that space exploration has depended on up to now. Our spacecraft would be recognizable to the great steamship engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, made of pressure vessels and other hard parts. These craft are fragile and subject to “single points of failure” (i.e, one seal goes and there goes the mission).

In order for longer term survivable spaceflight, especially for human crews, these craft will have to almost be alive, or at least be made up of billions of individual micro or nano-parts that are self monitoring and self healing. In this scenario, human crews are going to be like the brain organs in a larger biologically inspired vessel. I believe we are decades, maybe even centuries, from this kind of technology, but it will come.

In addition, evolved biologically-inspired robotic systems will mine outer space resources and prepare the solar system for Earth-life.

Picture trillions of flakes of solar collecting chemical nano-factories working something like an “ET lichen” coating the surface of a richly endowed asteroid, processing its stores of water ice, organic compounds, or metals. Human crews would stop by such asteroids to allow themselves (and their ships) to “feed” on the ET lichen. Indeed if the ET lichen manage to hollow out the asteroid and generate the correct mix of gases then the human crew could step inside for a break.

Other versions of “ET lichen” would have the potent capability of terraforming our own planet enabling us to cope with climate change and other effects of our civilization. As many science fiction writers and Hollywood directors has shown us, out of control ET lichen may also lead us to total annihilation.

The Artificial Life Programmer, the New Alchemist?

Like the medieval alchemists before them, programmers developing “Artificial Life” software (often shortened to “A-life”) are drawn to the elusive yet seductive proposition that they have the power to animate inanimate matter (Steen Rasumussen), except that in this modern incarnation of alchemy; the inanimate medium is a microscopic substrate of billions of transistors. (from “God, Science, and Intelligent Design,” chapter by Bruce Damer, upcoming in World Scientific, Singapore)

Bruce points out there is frequently confusion between the two fields of Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence. But this confusion, he notes, is a fertile field of inquiry.

A-life is a “bottom up” approach, wherein developers simulate “a large number of simple interacting components employing relatively simple rules from which complex behaviors of whole systems emerge (Chris Langton et al). AI on the other hand has tackled the ever receding goal of creating a “conscious” entity with which we would one day be able to communicate.”

God in the A-Life Universe

In his article for an upcoming book, “God, Science, and Intelligent Design,” Bruce undertakes a thought experiment in which he draws insights from the field of A-Life into a broader Intelligent Design/Creationism vs Evolution discussion.

The open question, “what is life?” underwrites the field of A-Life much as the question “what is consciousness?” does the field of Artificial Intelligence. And, these questions beg others on the role (or absence of role) of God(s).

Will Wright’s Spore: “God as the Intelligent Designer”

The screenshot above (see CNET for more) is from Spore the much anticipated new game from “Sims” creator Will Wright. Electronic Arts just announced that Spore, released through its Maxis Software brand, will go on sale on the weekend of Sept. 7, 2008. It is billed as “massively single-player” game, that “lets users create a universe, evolving from tiny organisms into civilizations capable of intergalactic travel.” (Canadian Press)

Bruce compares Spore with Karl Sim’s Evolved Virtual Creatures and argues they demonstrate two kinds of God in the A-Life universe:

Karl Sims’ – God the Mechanic setting up the initial conditions and then returning only occasionally to view the current state of the simulation; and the Will Wright, Intelligent Designer God, constantly providing opportunities to use and outside intelligence to steer the direction of the virtual universe.

The properties of A- Life software in its early phases can be represented along a continuum which at one end can be represented by Karl Sim’s evolving virtual creatures (see below) and on the other end Will Wright’s game Spore.

Karl Sim’s “Evolved Virtual Creatures” – “God the Mechanic”

Karl Sim’s creatures start life as a simple pair of hinged blocks in a virtual universe that simulates basic physical properties such as gravity, collisions and surface friction. From that point on the simulation was allowed to continue on its own without human intervention (although random mutations were introduced automatically into the “genome” of creatures between generations).

Bruce Damer’s: “God As the Intelligent Adapter”

Bruce analyzes “the copying rule,” as a fundamental principle of life in his article for the forthcoming book “God, Science, and Intelligent Design:”

A living organism differs from bare rock, gasses or a pool of liquid in ine very specific way: the living organism contains instructions that are copied, for the most part unaltered, from one version to the next.

Bruce argues, quite brilliantly, that the Copying Rule, along with the “Laws of Nature” and the element of uncertainty leads us to a notion of God not as an influencer of the future but as an “adept adapter” . And if you don’t see God in the picture the understanding of evolution by cumulative adaptation is even more remarkable for the fact no hand guides it.

Those who wish to celebrate the presence of a God in their lives and in all nature can believe that, God as the Brilliant Adapter, played a hand in the survival and glorious diversification of life on Earth as well as the blossoming richness of human culture and technology. Those who see no need to place an actor like God in the picture can celebrate and seek to better understand the process of evolution by cumulative adaptation, made even more astonishing by the very fact that no hand guided it.

“God who created all things in the beginning is himself created by all things in the end” Wrote Olaf Stapledon in 1937.

Performing the Future

The questions evolutionary technologies raise for human and planetary future are vast and far reaching. To explore the huge social and philosophical questions (Damer 2008) raised by the outputs of more advanced EvoGrids, as well as an enumeration of how evolution technologies will impact life on Earth and in space in the future, Bruce is planning a performance piece that will tour the world – “After the Evogrid.”

As a kind of cyber-hippie empresario (see Bruce above on right and his friend and Digibarn collaborator Al Lundell on the left) of nine virtual world conferences including one just three weeks ago featuring Virtual Worlds and Space for NASA, Bruce has always been deeply involved in firing the public’s imagination about the future. Now he intends to take his involvement with the public space to new heights with, “After the Evogrid,” – a “multimedia performance piece with a spoken word narrative, sound and music, and animated visuals.”

“After the Evogrid” will present both the promise and the perils of Humanity living in a symbiotic existence with the products of the new field of “evolution technology.”

The performance piece will bring together a unique combination of evolution technologies, personal and societal impacts, full biosphere implications and the expansion of life beyond the Earth. The EvoGrid itself will create the first open extensible grid protocol for evolution simulations.

So stand by for launch into an even weirder future, brought to you by “Doc Damer”?!