Bear Creek, California - Saturday Feb. 29, 1997, 14:00
© 1997 - Adriaan van Roeden -
a3@n-vision.nl
When I was in
Califonia to attend the Web 97 conference, I stayed at Alan
Lundell's House in Bear Creek. Bruce Damer also stayed there
because a storm had cut off the power to his house. After
hearing about the things he had done and what he was working on,
I decided to interview him :
(AvR) So
Bruce, here we are in the mountains in California, in a
very secluded space, the sun is shining...Let me start by
talking about how you nearly escaped from death, or,
well, your neighbor did. You live here in the mountains
of Bear Creek. There was a storm...
(Damer) There
was just a wind really. We had a lot of rain this year,
we had a period of thirty centimeters in three days, but
that wasn’t the problem. We regularly have winds
here and there are threes that one hundred of meters high
here. And the Douglas Firs fall apart all the time and
one was rocking back and forth and than hit my neighbors
house and exploded it. He was in his bed only five
minutes before, and he’d decided to go into town for
a coffee. And when he came back his house was in pieces.
My house was just missed. (AvR - you
got lucky there). I’d driven
at six o’ clock in the morning to the VRML
Conference and it happened two hours later...If I had
been in my bed I would have wondering whether the end of
the world was coming
Your power
got cut off?
Power and water
and everything else. For a cyberperson living in a cabin
in the mountains... Thanks God we have a whole community
for support......
And you went
over to Allan Lundell's house and that's were I met you..
(here's a a picture from Allan Lundell's Video, which shows the damage)
Yeah, I jacked
into the Metaverse again.. got into the Virtual World and
started working on this Ski hill in that world again. I
also did a book chapter review. Nobody knew what
happened.
One of the
things you’re doing is writing this book about
virtual worlds. Before we start talking about this book
I’d like you to introduce yourself a bit. Tell us
where you come from and how you've got to do your kind of
things.
Well, I’m
Bruce Damer, I was born in Canada, emigrated to the USA
to study how to make computers out of light. It seemed
that was far in the future, so I did my other passion,
which is interface-design. And I wrote a lot of software
in the eighties. I started working for a small company
that worked for Xerox. Then later, we - the chief and
myself - build a laboratory in Prague, Tsjecho Slovakia,
starting in 1990, we hired cold war engineers. We
renovated a villa, bribed a phone company to get a high
speed line there and we built an electronic community
with notes, and engineers all over Central Bohemia to
build software.
Then I started -
I always like to kind of start communities with people
around themes - a salon with a Tsjech artist, a painter
and a musician which we ran for a year. Every couple of
weeks we had an enormous private party where we
introduced Tsjech artists to wealthy patrons. Because
with the crops of communism there there isn’t any
funding so we wanted to connect them with private money
(There are a lot of millionaires).
But why did
you go to the Tsjech Republic of all places?
We knew that the
engineering talent.. - he (my chief) had actually worked
with Tsjechs in Norway - was just phenomenal. Because of
all the Eastern Bloc countries, it was were the most
successful duplicates of Western computers and software
were made. We found them brilliant - there are some slobs
but they had enough German blood in them, so that they
were very hard working, very methodical. So you have the
best of both worlds, so we could afford to build a large
lab without getting any venture funding. Yet for them it
was great, and they got to go to California a couple of
times a year to play tennis, which they loved. They’
re still working very happily there.
So you did
this for three years?
Yes, and then in
1994 I decided I wanted to - the Internet had just
started to really move. I saw Mosaic in ‘93, the
University of Colorado....
Was that in
1993? Didn’t they develop that in 1994?
The first test
copy came out in march of 1993. And then it was spreading
to the universities by the fall, there were like maybe
five or six hundred Web home pages by then. I was
visiting professor (Hookey), I started also a lab at the
(Trouse) University in Prague when I was on the faculty
there for three years doing special projects, to
introduce advanced interfaces and 3D to Tsjech students.
We bought all the computers and brought them in, and then
the university got a lot of wonderful hardware. So I
wanted to come back to get involved in the mainstream
again, in this case the Net, because I saw it was finally
getting to that point and...
You were
impressed what Mosaic made possible?
Yes, but I was
looking beyond Mosaic, because I knew because I had
worked for Xerox for ten years, I knew that documents -
documents are phenomenal interface, but the Web was
going through this phase, the Net was going through this
phase of building this enormous document database, that
would have animations and things , but fundamentally it's
just pages. It ‘s flat. And the original intention
of the Internet was to function as a community mechanism, and
that the Web would include that. And I could see that
beyond the Web there would be like this return of
community were things like muds and moose and IRC and the
Chatworld - they have an incredible social richness in
history - and that that is far more powerful then say the
Web and this document database.
Did you
participate in these Moo's and Muds and on-line worlds at
that time?
To some extent.
I wasn’t very attracted by the text interface, and
all the terminology you had to master. It was kind of
like DOS.
And every
world has it's own set of arcane commands...
Yeah, and I had
done like enough learning in programming language in
arcane systems to... But I could see then when those
environments got a visual interface, when people were
embodied by what we now call avatars, and the worlds were
visual, it would probably reduce the level of dialogue,
but it would increase the appeal, and it would be quite
an exposure. And I read Snow Crash like everyone else.
Well I
didn’t, I still have to...
It was apparent
that that vision could come one day, so I hooked up with
people I had known for a couple of years, Contact
Cultures of the Imagination, which was a group of
anthropologists and NASA scientists. And that group
included science fiction writers, many of the worlds most
known science fiction writers, anthropologists, community
designers, primate researchers, space scientists and
their whole theme was trying to see what happens when
human beings contact another civilization.
So you got in
touch with Neil Stephenson?
No, I did later.
By then he wasn’t a part of this group. He was the
younger generation, they were the older generations
science fiction writers like Gerry Parnell, Larry Niven
and Paul Anderson. And part of the theme of the
organization was creating Muds for education, creating a
future human civilization in the solar system, and each
university did a Mud simulation and created its own
community. And then the communities would be put into
contact with each other. And this is called the Bateson
Project, named for Gregory Bateson who was like the
mentor of this organization in a sense, of all the people
here. And so that was organized out of the Northern
Arizona University, by a guy named professor Ried Reiner,
and he was hugely successful, they got major awards.
Students learns how to create a whole community, how to
interact, how to contact other communities. This started
in ‘89 and it's still going on. And that was a
virtual world which was truly well structured.
So by the
time you got involved with that it was well underway?
Yes, and at the
same time this contact organization had created virtual
worlds, modeled virtual worlds for about fifteen years,
because the science fiction writers would call them and
say: "I’m gonna design a planet an
asociety." And they would actually... teams in this
organization would design everything from geology to
social structure to it’s creation myths, total
climate design...
Wow..
For years and
years. It was a project called (Iponah), which was
finished in 1995, and that was fantastic. It was some of
the best work that Larry Niven had ever seen, and that
says a lot. So our conception was, given that we had deep
experience in virtual communities in the text sense, that
formally structured communities that were successful, we
headed with variation criteria. You could eveluate the
effectis every year. And then we had these virtual world
structures. We felt you could combine Iponah and this Sol
Sys simulation, make Iponah the planet and embody people
somehow, and you have the elements.
So what we
decided to do is form a new group of the Contact
consortium. I’m one of the three directors. And that
group is an independent non-profit group, and the Contact
consortium set up to say: "hey, at some point people
are going to look for you how to do visual Muds",
and there's gonna be this enormous human contact that
occurs to the Internet because it will be real-time scene
of people moving around in the space that you can share.
It’s gonna be a phenomenon. And human cultures will
clash, sensibilities and races, ages and economic groups,
and all kinds of new cultures, microcultures will emerge
in these virtual worlds.
By the time
you were doing this you had already returned to the
States. You also started your own company.
I started a
company that did actually a lot of consulting for Xerox
as well. It was like a transition. And now I’m doing
consulting for other companies, purely in virtual worlds.
One of the
nice things of your company is that it is totally
'virtual'.
Totally.
There’s no office. I've build an office in three
virtual worlds where I meet people, like we meet in the
buildings. We have a lot of facilities on-line, so we
have a room with all the Web pages plastered on the
walls, talking voices like: "Hello, welcome to
digital space." And we get it done in that way,
people leave their objects there. So we’re trying to
use the medium actually to do really serious business.
The consortium has monthly exercises.
Obviously the
companies you work for take this seriously. They accept
that you don’t have a real office?
Yes, that’s
very much accepted. They see you as a consultant, they
see you as an access to a network. Because I’m one
of the directors of this consortium of which most of the
companies are members, and they attended my conference
that I helped put together since last fall, they
don’t have any question about... What they’ re
after is my knowledge and my contacts which I build
through the Contact Consortium.
You also
started organizing a conference about this?
Yes, it was held
in San Francisco in October and it was called:
‘Earth to Avatars’, trying to wake people up,
trying to tell them: "Hello, there’s an earth
here..." Because the Contact Consortium was founded
in March of 1995 and in April of 1995 the very first
virtual world came on the Internet, a 3D world of
avatars.
When did
(VRML) ...?
(VRML) was
launched virtually the same day that the World’s
Chat Space Station (which you saw) came on-line. Because
World’s Chat already did what the (VRML’s)
would eventually try to do two-three years later, so
there have been a number of virtual worlds that came
one-line. VRML is still working up toward this vision, but
it will get there. The VRML community did not identify
avatars and virtual worlds as an important application
really until last year. For the most part they saw it as
a way to do models, to do virtual malls and things like
that. There wasn't this realization that the embodiment
of people was the 'killer app'.
Would you say
that your conference helped them to get this realization?
You brought all this people together and established a
community...
Yes, that was a
part of the purpose of the conference, because the VRML
community was able to see for the first time that there
were a lot of people making spaces, whether they be 2- or
3 dimensional, on the Net where people can meet and have
a body, a visual body, do all kind of things. Trading and
bargaining and insulting and building and building towns
and things like that. And the VRML community now
understands that there are many ways to do it and that
the VRML still has a ways to go. But they have contact
with people like the Palace, or people who did Alpha
World.
And these are
all huge on-line virtual environments?
Yes, Alpha World
has 125,000 registered users and has a city scape that
has a hundreds of square kilometers, that has been build
in 3D by ordinary people in the whole world. A lot of them
were build by kids. The city has it’s own culture,
it’s own history, lot’s of Web-sides around it,
attached to tiny post boxes, newspaper boxes. If you
click there you get a Web page. That’s the metaphor
of how they tie the Web in their communities. It’s
the newspapers and magazines. Which makes sense,
that’s the way it is in the real world.
Right now
you’re one of the authorities in this field. You are
writing a book about all this for Addison Wesley..
It will be
published by the Earthly Westcoast Division called Peach
Pitt Press, and it’s gonna be a starter kit.
The title?
‘Avatars’,
just ‘Avatars’, the subtitle will be:
‘Exploring and building virtual worlds on the
Internet." We are not using the word ‘virtual
reality’, because this is not virtual reality. VR
has gotten quite a bad name now, because it is so
overhyped.
And here’s
a good story for you for the parallels with pretty much a
hundred years ago. The filmindustry was just starting and
Edison was building these nicolodian boxes were you could
put your head in. You put in a nickle and you could see a
film. Those were quite a sensation for a while. They
would show it in faire grounds, in cities at major
streetcorners. They were electrically powered and
everything. Ladies didn’t like using them. They had
to bend over, man could look at them. This is Victorian
times you know...
But the
engineers in Edison's labs wanted to build a camera that
would project onto a screen, They went proposing this to
Edison that they could open theatres, music halls,
charging at the door, and everybody would sit there and
share an experience on a common screen without this box.
And it wouldn’t be as immersive. And Edison got so
upset that he threw them out and they eventually quit.
They formed their own company and opened a theatre.
At the same time
the Lumiere brothers were doing the same thing in France.
The whole theme was that you move from this rather
difficult piece of gadgetry that somebody wanted to sell
boxes, that was Edison’s complaint to them; They
were going to undercut his sales. Because he sold for
similar prices, phonograph records, telephones. The
parallels with today: 1989-1991; you had this whole idea
of virtual reality, where you would pull a head set and
you had to go to a booth and things like that. And
you’d paid five dollars. And you went to an
immersive performance. Personally, every time I tried
those things I got sick and I’ve tried almost every
system..
How about
playing Doom? Does that make you sick too? Because
lot’s of people do get sick from it.
No, but I
wouldn’t doubt it. They should make a smaller
window..
Anyway, the
parallels there, this was here and there was a lot of
excitement about it. Then what happened was virtual
worlds came, and virtual worlds meant that you could do
that without the gear, but on a common shared screen with
thousands of people.
But of course
they are not immersive..
But in a sense
it’s like you’re going to a movie theatre and
you immerse yourself into the world with your mind. Like
reading a book or watching a film. It's really to immerse
yourself. You don’t need to have encompassing
vision.
But the next
level would be going beyond that into real immersive
experiences?
That depends on
how it is really done...
But the
technology is not really that far.
Then again, like
the (nicholodian), it’s a lot more fun to go a
theatre and share a film with people, than it is to be
alone in the theatre. Certainly you can sit at home with
a head monted display and experience the world.
But if the
immersion is really good, it’s like being there with
all those people...
What you find is
the technology, the spaces of people within these virtual
worlds. They’re nice to explore for a while, but
eventually people really don’t care. They care about
the interaction and the people they meet. It’s kind
of like the Palace, it has now thousands... it has twelve
hundred servers now. And that’s really simple: 2D
worlds with little cartoon avatars. People they
don’t... they’re not there for the world, but
for the interaction, for the gimmicks, and the stuff they
can trade. So the experience of a social virtual world.
It’s not a game or a scientific exploration.
So the social
experience is very important to you?
Yes, very
important. And in the Netherlands: the Digitale Stad
Amsterdam, that was an early proof of the concept. And
that was... (Rolf van der Haar) was one of the people -he
is now with Philips - The Netherlands seem to have a very
strong community ethic, and that project was the
inspiration for a lot of the virtual worlds. because it
was done so simply and elegantly, and the whole idea of
neighborhoods, the people could built in their
neighborhood.
They could
erect their own house...
Yes. So that was
a very early - it was 1993 ...
They also got
a bit of funding...
Yes, they sold
space, advertising space.
But it was
also subsidized.
I’m sure,
well what isn’t subsidized in the Netherlands,....(AvR
- everything..), at least that used
to be the case. All of this is come now to pass, and you
have 350,000 - 400,000 people using virtual worlds on the
net. And it’s growing really really rapidly. New
environments coming up all the time, new approaches. VRML
is only a very small approach to this... There are so
many other worlds using different technologies.
But VRML is
important in the sense that it is a standard, it’s
like the HTML of the virtual worlds...
Yes, but it has
another generation to go through before it can really do
any avatar worlds. There are a couple of environments
that do, but they do it with custom extensions. So they
become proprietary. There’s no way in VRML right now
to say: here’s all of the things to describe in
avatar and all of the social things that people want.
Like what is in my pocket. This is a very big problem
(space), and there a several groups working on it,
notably 'universal avatars' and 'living worlds', two
groups working on this with... they tend to get into
discussions that are so big, it’s about the totality
of human experience. How do you come down with a
technical spec out of that. It’s difficult.
So it is
becoming more popular all the time. And is there money
being made?
By some, it
depends on the model. Most of it’s venture capital
support.
What about
stores in these virtual worlds, is this something which
is going to happen?
It’s always
being predicted and promoted as one of the utilities of
the world, but there’s been very little done, and in
one of the worlds there's a Macdonald's and people
aren’t there. Because you don’t of course go to
a Macdonald's to socialize, you go to somebody's kitchen
of where ever.
And virtual
burgers don't taste like much..
Not really. And
there’s been record stores. Tower records has a
store in the (Oz) World where you can hear the music, and
that’s possibly a very cool application. If you had
high enough speed networks you could download the music
and pay for it.
Because one
of the things you can do nowadays in these virtual worlds
is hear audio and there are even some worlds where the
characters which represent you they have a lipsync with
the audio so they...
And 3D heads
that move and talk and they bump into you. You can play
avatar football. There’s a broad range of social
experience.
So this is
what your book is about? Does it also tell about the
development, the history, the culture?
Yes, very much
so, because it’s trying to be a starter's kit for
children, schools and people at home. And it also tells
the story of how it happened, and what happens in the
worlds. The big wheels in the world; How ordinary
citizens in their homes have become big players, well
respected in the virtual world. This is what they’ve
build, the events they host. They’ve become known
names, and....
there was a
story about a baby that was able to get into a virtual
world. This virtual world has microphones, and you talk
into your avatars head. The baby is five months old and
had always looked to the family, the family was using
this every night, including the five year old brother.
And one day, evening nobody was around and the virtual
world was up, and there were avatars heads moving around
talking.
The baby got out
of it’s crib and got up on the table, because he was
really determined to get to it on his own. Because no one
would let him use it. No one offered. He was five months
old and he pushed the spacebar down to open the mike,
because he knew that. He took the mike and put it in his
mouth, and started sucking on the mike as hard as he
could. And people came over to the avatar, which was his
mother’s avatar and saying: ‘What’s wrong?
What happened? Are you OK? You're sounding like the baby
in the Simpson's. You are doing a really good imitation
of that baby sucking away...’
And as soon as
the baby saw that he had gotten communications, he
started screaming, and his mother came running, but his
screams were of joy, because the baby had done on his
own... he knew that he had finally got them to come over.
He saw their faces, and he had communicated through the
Internet, though he didn’t know that it was the
Internet.
He must be
one of the youngest virtual world inhabitants ever...
Yeah, probably,
The youngest person to use the Internet on his own
initiative . Not being helped.
Looks nice on
you resume.
(laughing) His
name is Mark E. And he is in there al the time. He is one
now. He has his own avatar now, and he knows not to suck
on the microphone and to put it in his mouth.
What about
this thing that happened, with the dog or person who fell
asleep and the avatar was snoring...?
It turned out
that it was an engineer at NEC in Japan and we were in
the virtual world and we saw this microphone avatar and
the sound which came out was like snoring, so we went
over to it and there was a big crowd of avatars around.
There’s he was snoring for like half an hour in the
corner there and we couldn’t wake him up. But
eventually he must have woken up and realized because in
Japan a lot of people sleep at their desks.
Yes, they
work too hard, work themselves to death.. And your book
is also a how-to-do-this- on-your-own-guide?
Absolutely, how
to build an avatar, the beginnings of how to build your
own world. For avatar worlds, there are a few
environments that allow you to do that, there are some
like Alphaworld..
So your book
describes how to build your own world, how to
participate. When will it be published?
It should be
imprinted in April or May, and June or July it should be
available.
One of the
nice things of the book is that it’s done completely
on the Net, on the Web even.
Full text and
images, because the reviewers are the public, the people
who use the world are reviewing the chapters and are
putting their own stories there.
You get
contributions from other people?
Many, many
people have a story to tell. We tell their story and put
their picture in the chapter. So there is a lot of human
interest. It’s good to let them be able to see what
it looks like before it’s published.
So you have a
very quick feedback on anything you do ?
Yes, a day or
two.
This is the
first time a book has been put together like that?
Accordingly to
the publishers it’s the first time they’ve ever
seen it done this way, a fully composed Web sites, that
has everything, including the cover art. Including
production schedule. So everybody has access to a common
set of ideas, no paper has ever been send, paper
manuscripts or review samples.
How do you
think where this all will lead to, how do you see the
future of vision of virtual worlds?
I think it will
be a very new exciting communication medium, kind of like
this family in Virginia where they talk all the time with
their relatives in the virtual world. And they are now
thinking to built a space for the baby's pictures and
voices. So when the baby speaks they can attach his
sounds to the wall so that friends and relatives can come
in and meet him in an avatar and see what he has been
doing. So that means a new communication medium that
extends beyond the telephone. Cause you’re building
a space that you couldn’t have in the real world.
But you’re meeting people in this space, that
you’re able to do things, to give gifts and objects,
to create things there, to put part of your life there.
That vision is
like the 21 century telephone. Because we had the
telephone for a long time, it’s time for a change.
You can’t just add video, because people aren't
particularly interested in this, they don’t like how
they look anyway. That’s why video falls. But if you
add these worlds it may be enough to reinvent the
telephone. There are the future visions of this whole
idea of artificial life what we call (Biota) emerging in
the virtual world.
That’s
yet another thing you do, you’re also very busy with
this artificial life thing, self-generating organisms..
When you have a
virtual world you can make it interesting by putting
people in there. And the people do interesting things.
But the real world is interesting, because we’re
living with other living things, so you gotta bring that
into the virtual world.
Like virtual
trees.
Exactly. We call
them, we have a name system: a bot or robot in the
software world. It’s a common term. Biot is a robot
like a pet dog that’s sort of like an agent, trying
to behave like a biological form. And then there’s
Biota. Biota doesn’t care about you. It’s in
there on it’s own, has it’s own ecosystem,
it’s own survival, it’s not necessarily aware
that people are there. It’s self evolving, self
organizing. And that’s what we’re looking at,
that is what we are building in this Biota working group.
I’m one of the several founders of that. And that is
a very impassioned worldwide project.
So it’s
really a world that mixes people with artificial
creatures.
Eventually in
decades hence the artificial creatures aren’t gonna
seem that artificial anymore, because they are going to
be so evolved on their own, that no one could have
understood how they got there. And they will provide
humanity a very important engineering survival tool.
Because you can try out whole new ways of building robots
and forms. And eventually if you can fabricate those
forms, the way they have evolved in the Net, you have a
revolution in engineering. If you want to live in the
solar system, you are not going to do it with the
technology you have now. You are going to do it with
organisms who can live in vacuum and of solar power. You
got to evolve those to prepare the ground for humans if
they ever going to live off the earth. Thing like that
which are becoming obvious, like we are trying to build
space stations... that is just.. The environment
doesn’t treat 19th century technology like tanks and
things very well. We're not going to see see starship
enterprises. You got to have living things there first to
prepare the ground..
Some
interesting things you do there...
It’s going
to be a fun project, because we’re gonna have all
these VRML based forms, that are having their own
behavior, like dancing crabs that you walk up to and they
move, they sense you, they have a growing garden in VRML,
called the (Nerve garden). Where we are growing these
plants. So those are just very early stages, it’s a
lot of fun, lot’s of people want to be involved in
that. Lot’s of kids like that to. If it appeals kids
we are on the right track. Because the children are gonna
do all the evolution, the building.
They're gonna
take it from here.
And that’s
why it has to be usable by kids.
When will be
your next conference?
I’m not
sure yet, October (?) here in San Francisco. And in
August in Canada we are going to have a workshop on
artificial live and virtual worlds. You can find this on:
www.ccon.org
..You
have to catch your plane - so let’s end this. Thanks
for the interview..
Ok, thank you
See also :
http://www.damer.com |