Bruce Damer
Bruce Damer is one of the pioneers of the medium of avatars and virtual worlds having established some of the first projects, conferences, and books about graphical multiuser worlds on the Internet in the mid 1990s. In 1995 he established DigitalSpace, a company that uses the power of 3D game chips to provide industrial design simulation for NASA and other big research organizations. If NASA is considering a new mission, they can now go beyond spreadsheets, sketches and still images and use DigitalSpace to create drive-able simulations of mission vehicles and astronauts. DigitalSpace recently completed a design simulation for NASA that shows one way that a human crew might visit the surface of an asteroid. As the CEO and lead designer at DigitalSpace, Bruce has provided design concepts for numerous NASA studies including a rover to explore for water ice on the moon to the building of a full lunar base using robotics as well as scenarios for human missions to mars. New projects are underway to support the European Space Agency's Exomars lander, Chinese Lunar rovers and private space tourism. Bruce's other ventures include Project Biota, a research and development project about using the power of evolution to create "new forms of life" in software and evolve innovative robotics, the Digibarn Computer Museum which chronicles the history of personal computing, and lives on an organic farm in the redwood forests of Northern California with his wife, singer and cyber performer Galen Brandt, their three pigs and two cats.