Bruce Damer's commencement address (delivered in Second Life) on Virtual Worlds: The New Medium for the 21st Century for a University of Washington course graduation class (Aug 27, 2009)

1. Virtual Worlds: The New Medium for the 21st Century … as powerful as the combination of media from the 19 th Century that drove life in the 20 th …

2. Projecting into Virtual Worlds circa 25,000 BCE

3. Projecting virtual worlds Through The Lanterna Magika (1671)

4. A shared experience: the Cinema replaced the earlier Kinetoscope Parlors

5. So where did (digital) virtual worlds come from? We first learned to play together in a digital world in Spacewar! in 1962 (on a PDP-1)

6. … and in 1974, the first 3D virtual worlds in Maze War

7. … then in 1986 affordable personal computers are connected to dial-up networks And Lucasfilm’s Habitat (and avatars) were born

8. And then… Worlds Chat, 1995: where Avatars first teleported into the Internet Also in that year Steven Spielberg created the marriage of virtual worlds and Hollywood with Starbright World

9. Followed by an explosion of worlds in the mid 1990s…

10. Explosion of Social Virtual Worlds platforms (Book Avatars by Damer – 1997)

11. Alphaworld 1995 “first teleport” And in-world building

12. And emergence of community And shared building

13. Working out how to meet (talking circle) and working together to build-Sherwood Forest Towne (Jan ‘96). Roles, Robin Hood, Town Crier, old towne layout, new town, vandalism, first informal ethnographic practice

15. The Avatars IRL Conferences Earth to Avatars 96 (San Francisco)

16. Design of the first large scale event in avatar cyberspace: Avatars98 Inside Cyberspace first CyberConference

17. AW-versionDesign elements: single large meeting space - avatars, chat, web cams, streaming voice, bots

18. Visual and functional elements of Avatars98

19. … and through common media archetypes: Avatars2001

20. 1990s… Beginnings of Multiplayer Gaming Worlds

21. 2003-present: Second Generation of Social Virtual Worlds

22. Going where No Virtual World has Gone Before: Virtual Walk on the Moon with Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart Rusty Schweickart in Cyber Space - 1999 Rusty Schweickart in Outer Space - 1969

23. Rusty became our historical actor and narrator to commemorate the 30 th anniversary of the Apollo XI moon landing

27. ` Bruce goes where no avatar has gone before: Cyberspace meets Outerspace – Driving on Mars

28. Roving the moon looking for water ice

29. And Bruce’s Avatar has gone where no Avatar has gone before

30. Virtual Worlds: The New Medium for the 21st Century What is in the future? The answer: it may be the medium that best expresses the inner self to allow a transformation of the outer life…

31. Burning Man… a virtual world for transformation of the self

32. Example, Bruce’s iDoublet Project Garments permit Avatars walking “out-world”

33. The EvoGrid, the Ultimate Bio-World An “artificial origin of life” in cyberspace in this Century

34. To the class of ‘009… How has your life in-world changed you IRL? Thank you!