Bruce obviously has done a lot of cool stuff, and I respect all the educational components that he's worked on. But the one thing that truly amazed me was what he and the Digital Space Commons team were able to build on 1994 hardware - now that takes vision and dedication.

Bruce Damer’s talk on virtual environments was informative. So many different industries, from aerospace to fashion, are using digital space to prototype and experiment with designs. This approach seems much more cost effective to test potential products in virtual space, before making a “real” prototype. The visual effects industry has been using this concept for a while and it has driven down the costs for some big budget movies. In the case of Black Hawk Down, I believe they only purchased one helicopter and modeled the rest for the film. Instead of having to destroy an expensive prop in some of the action sequences, they could recreate the downing of the helicopter with a good physics engine.

Among the cool Bruce's work I've seen at the seminar, particularly "sodarace" took my attention. Watching lots of different shapes of wireframe polygons trying to run as fast as they can, I could strongly feel unique characters of them. It might be a result of some sophisticated calculations, but they actually seemed alive to me with their own will to run somewhere. I could even feel the heart beat of them trying best with their given genetic form of body. Maybe it's because they keep trying to find their best way to move their body no matter how disadvantageous their bodies are, and that brought the image of a living thing trying to overcome their fate. It's pretty amazing thing to make something which provokes lots of emotional response out of pure calculation.

I think this was a good way to start the new year, Bruce went through a fairly good sampling of projects, events, and technologies. When researching his past work I ended up stumbling across a lot of common interests, from space exploration to the Burgess Shale. There are certain, enigmatic elements to these areas that have a distinct appeal, and I'm curious how an Amazon "you'd also like these books/movies/media" list would look on all of the Biota conference members.

I'll be working with Buce in these next few months, continuing with my exploration of a-life and virual environments. Should prove to be interesting!

I hope I'm not cheating when I describe this story Bruce related to a small group the day before the presentation...but I thought the best things I heard from him related to his experiences and stories from Czechoslovakia a decade ago. He related a story of participating in the jump of the University of Prague into the electronic world. Thanks to the rule of years preceding, the University had nothing close to a library. Thus, it was decided that the only thing to do was to jump headlong into the internet...and to do it without the school's official blessing or the telco's. After the headmaster called it a plan so good that it could not be blessed, lest it be derided for not having occurred earlier, students went to work bribing city workers out from under the streets of Prague with food and drink...and taking their place, drilling under the school campus and wiring building after building.

Just the idea that such a huge leap occurred, completely omitting the step of book and journal gathering, just awes me as I think of it. That mix of ingenuity and sheer pluck... I feel like I should be doing some more around here.

About all I can do right now is wonder how the ZML amp is getting overloaded despite not receiving any audio signal. BAH.

Aside from the renaissance garb, I think perhaps the most compelling idea presented was the Darwin@home service. I think that choosing a distributed system for developing a-life technologies is a intriguing choice, and one that makes a case for why bottom-up, emergent systems make for a more logical way to approach artifical intelligence than the more top-down model of the single intelligent AI system.

I also have to say, that getting an old two story bus was quite amazing.

That, and the idea that old computers can still be put to use, not just put out to pasture.

This talk really blew me away - I was just so impressed with how deeply Bruce is involved in such a large range of interests and activities. I think the most moving moment for me was actually right at the start of his talk when we had the avatars from the virtual conference space up on all the screens and could hear the voices of Bruce's colleagues who were in West Virginia and Australia. I can't really describe how it made me feel - in a way it felt like meeting beings from a whole other dimension. It sent shivers down my spine. I can understand how the virtual moonwalk project with Russell Schweickart moved the participants so much. The thing is, I can't pin down what exactly made me feel that way, and I'm sure that it was personal enough that it would not apply to a lot of other people. So how can we take advantage of that kind of environment to create a moving experience for people from a huge range of backgrounds?

Obviously, these amazing applications relate deeply with comprehensive however concentrated researchs on interactivity. I'm impressed more by Bruce's multi-exertions surfing the web data linked by Scott.

Triggered by the "simple" cross-the-street-tutorial, I'm now enjoying some mass neural connections in my shull of "immersive psychotherapy"--no such a term can be googled;) Since that surrealistic thus slightly less believable cartoon-like environment takes effect on children's learning, what if some "more real" immersive+interactive cinematic environment is affored to those psychologically handicapped adults? (This could partly explain how stupid it might be to conduct the Interactive Cinema study/research being intertangled by starting from storytelling--usually 3-act multi-endinged theatrically structured stories. Medium has thing-in-itself which has nothing to do with the later-on discovered utilization of telling a story.(It's always inspirational for me to think again the first(usually ignored) motivation for people like E.G. Marne(?), Edward, Edision, and Lumiere invent the motion recording machine....)

We are now familiar with the environments that simulates certain situations to train people professional skills e.g. for fighter pilots. Great expansion of VR(3D cinematica interactive environment) can take place in some other fields including therapeutic treatment of psychological disorders. A graphic environment which is "real" enough allow users to feel physically presece in a virtual world and interact with it. What's more, compared to the “traditional” , its advantages of being protected for the patient and re-experience many times the feared situation do help. I believe more ingenious device can be carried out with this interdisciplinary study.

The most interesting thing Bruce said was that "ordinary people need 'lego blocks' if they are to build things in a virtual world. The minute you give them 'wireframe access', you're screwed." I have often wondered what a consumer-friendly real-time 3D engine would look like, and Bruce's lego block approach holds promise.

I liked the idea of evolving complex machines such as spacecraft. It makes sense, when you compare a spacecraft to other complicated machines, spacecraft seem to have a unique mix of having to be robust, handle a wide range of extremes over a very long amount of time and be able to adapt to pretty unpredictable circumstances. I can think of parallels with the human body as a system.

Reading over these comments its clear that Damer left a rich series of ideas in his wake. And he thoroughly recorded the events himself:

http://www.darwinathome.org/news/05-01-12-USC-CinemaTV-Presentation/index.html

I was primarily struck by his living conditions - fueled by ideals and curiosity, he's found himself a place between aerospace and programming, defense and ren faire. It's inspiring to hear from someone who has lived in a life in creation. The digital arts aside, he's a renaissance sort, working to make worlds he can experiment upon and understand. So we were pulled into the Damer-vortex for an evening and it was memorable and exciting and inspiring even. And for a group of students, I don't think you can get much better than inspiring. I was reminded again, I want to make clothes.

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