NASA Virtual World and Immersive Environments Workshop Speaker List/Links

I am finally home from our weekend at NASA. What an amazing experience! This was a most memorable weekend. I met so many people, all of whom were friendly and more than willing to sit and talk about virtual worlds and their own backgrounds and life experiences. There were so many people attending, and so little time to spend with them all outside of the workshop.

I’m going to start my blogging from the weekend by listing all of the speakers at the NASA Virtual Worlds Workshop, with links to information on each of them and their endeavors. Everyone at the workshop came from varied backgrounds, and I wish I could post about all of them too, but since they were not speakers at the workshop I will keep their privacy (unless they email me and give me permission to list them here).

All of the presentations at the Workshop were collected, and I was told they would soon be made available online. I will post a link here as soon as I get it for those interested.

NASA Virtual World and Immersive Environments Workshop Speakers List:

• Bruce Damer: the Gandalf of Virtual Worlds, CEO and founder of Digital Space Commons, Director of Contact Consortium and curator of the Digibarn Computer Museum
• Matthew Hancher: Research Scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of NASA’s Ames Research Center (and active Twitterer)
• Alan Hudson: President of Yumatech, Inc and President Web3d Consortium
• Ron Creel: Space and Thermal Systems Engineer, Ryan Associates (member of the Lunar Rover team awarded a Silver Snoopy)
• Tom Cochrane: Project Manager, Raytheon Technical Services
• S. Pete Worden: Center Director, NASA Ames Research Center
• Will Wright: Game Designer God (and designer of the much anticipated SPORE, and a few other games that started with ‘Sim’ – hint: SimCity and others)
• Margaret Corbit (AKA: Queenbee): Manager, Research Outreach, Cornell Theory Center and Director, SciCentr.org
• Daniel Laughlin: Assistant Research Scientist, Information Science and Educational Technology, Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center
• Stan Trevena: Director, Information and Technology Services, Modesto City Schools and co-founder of the Pacific Rim Exchange project on the Teen Grid of Second Life
• Cathy Arreguin: MA, Educational Technology, Instructor: SDSU, EDTEC700: 3D MultiUser Learning Environments Instructional Technology * Educational Media * Virtual Instruction
• Corey Bridges: Co-founder, Executive Producer and Marketing Director, Multiverse
• Khal Shariff: Virtual Reality Center, Winnepeg, Canada, CEO Project Whitecard
• Mary Duda: CEO/President of VirtuePlay, Inc
• Rob Rothfarb: Director of Web Development at Exploratorium and co-founder of Splo (a virtual museum in Second Life)
• Larry Smarr: Founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and Harry E. Gruber professor in the Jacobs School’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD.
• Crista Lopes: Professor of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, UC Irvine, Second Life SkyTran
• Rudy Rucker: Author, scientist, artist and professor (Presentation link)
• Henrik Bennetsen: Research Director, Stanford Humanities Lab, Metverse U
• George T. Whitesides: Executive Director, National Space Society
• Ed Lance: MSEE, Founder of The Harmony Channel, operates Visual Bandwidth Inc. and is CTO for Vortex Immersion Media
• Bob Ketner: StudioSFO, Virtual World Sig