ARE2010

I'm going to an augmented reality industry conference in June!!! This is very exciting for me for a few reasons. First off the conference is being keynoted by my favorite cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling. I managed to meet him before when he walked into my cafe at Survival Research Laboratories event we hosted in Phoenix at the Icehouse in 1996.

What I think is important for me about Sterling's interest in AR is that it is a great synchronicity for me. I grew up reading his books and am now by independent means entering into an industry that he has become a spokesman for. This just one reason for the excitement.

I've been involved in the game industry for over 4 years now as an instructor... Recently in the past year I've returned to ASU to pursue a masters in computer science with a focus on games and everything is point me to AR games... The GaLLaG project is basically AR gaming, so I've been daydreaming about lots of different AR games to make. I'm hoping to write up a few of them and pitch them to some of the up and coming new companies.

The event also features talks from game designers Will Wright and Jesse Schell. Will Wright is a game designing superstar I get to discuss regularlly in my classes and Jesse Schell has been blowing up this year because of a talk he gave at DICE2010 in February. I'm planning to prepare a list of questions for everyone as well as pitch my work.

There should be lots of start up companies there as well as plenty of workshops geared at startup companies. In some respects, I'm working on starting a game company this year so it's a great conference for me to go to.

Here's the schedule for the conference:

Here's an amazing Sterling lecture on AR from last year:

Video: Bruce Sterling's Keynote - At the Dawn of the Augmented Reality Industry from Maarten Lens-FitzGerald on Vimeo.

Here's a poster from the SRL show from 1996 at the Icehouse