On Thursday, May 15, at 2pm EDT (8pm CEST) there will be a meeting in Second Life to discuss the VR renaissance outlined in Back to the future in the Metaverse.

Location: Soleri City, Terasem Island, Second Life. Click here to teleport to Soleri City (requires a Second Life viewer)

 Speakers:

Philip Rosedale is a visionary technology entrepreneur and founder of Second Life. Rosedale’s new project, High Fidelity, is “building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.” Think: a distributed Metaverse powered by end-user devices, Oculus Rift support out-of-the-box, total immersion, live avatars with body language and non-verbal expression, and low-latency, real 3D VR user interfaces.

Ben Goertzel is currently Vice Chair of Humanity+. His research work encompasses artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds and gaming and other areas. He has served as a university faculty in the US, China, Australia and New Zealand, and published a dozen scientific books. See Artificial General Intelligence in Second Life (2007).

Stephen Larson is a co-founder and the project coordinator for the OpenWorm open science project which aims to reverse engineer a whole organism in an in silico digital model. He currently works as the CEO of MetaCell, a systems biology informatics company. His diverse educational background includes a bachelor of science and master of engineering from MIT in computer science as well as a Ph.D in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego.

Natasha Vita-More is a Professor at the University of Advancing Technology. She designed “Primo Posthuman“, and her current work includes developing a transhumanist research center. She is co-editor and contributing author of The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future. She is currently Chair of Humanity+, former President of Extropy Institute, and a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

The Rev. Christopher Benek is a PCUSA pastor on Hilton Head Island, SC and is completing the world’s first ever Doctor of Ministry in Science and Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He also holds two other advanced degrees in theology (Ethics) and will begin a PHD researching Theology and Technological Futurism at Durham University in the fall of 2014. See Virtual Reality is Going to Change How We Experience Church.

David Orban is CEO of Dotsub, and Advisor and member of the Faculty at Singularity University. An early adopter and experimenter of immersive virtual reality, his interdisciplinary work cuts across silos of specialization to uncover innovative bridges of value creation.

Giulio Prisco, a Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, is a VR consultant as well as a writer, futurist, and transhumanist. He writes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including science, information technology, emerging technologies, virtual worlds, space exploration and futurology. He is Transhumanism Editor at KurzweilAI.

Khannea Suntzu, a Second Life artist who had her name legally changed to her avatar name, is a transgendered technoprogressive with a far-leftist stance on society and progress. She is an outspoken advocate of life extension, space industrialization, basic income, societal resilience, and radically new modes of communication and social interaction.

Thanks to Martine Rothblatt, visionary technology entrepreneur and social activist, founder of Terasem (see this recent Time article), for allowing the use of Terasem Island in SL.

The event is free to attend but donations to the OpenWorm Kickstarter will be appreciated. You can donate in-world or on Kickstarter.

Contacts: Giulio Prisco, Khannea Suntzu

Second Life contacts (avatars):

giulioprisco
Eschatoon Magic
Khannea Suntzu
Kirsch Greenwood
Perplexing Poultry