Thursday 19 March @ 12:00 PM SLT, VWBPE Auditorium

About Philip Rosedale, in His Words

Born in San Diego, the son of a Navy carrier pilot whose deployments took my family all over the United States before returning to San Diego for high school and college. BS Physics, UCSD ’92.

Fell in love with coding in middle school, and started a software company in high school which helped me pay for college. Moved to San Francisco in ’94, discovered the Internet, and created FreeVue, a videoconferencing app that worked over dialup with the earliest web cameras. Acquired by RealNetworks in late ’95, where I led the creation of RealVideo and became CTO.

In ’99, I left RealNetworks and founded Linden Lab to create Second Life and fulfill my dream of building a virtual world. After 10 years running Second Life as CEO, I started several experimental new companies with two co-founders, including LoveMachine, Worklist.net, and Coffee & Power. In 2013, after experimenting with the mems gyro chips that would enable the Oculus Rift, we started High Fidelity to build a new open-source virtual world platform for VR Headsets. In 2019, with VR failing to gain wide consumer acceptance, refocused High Fidelity on spatial audio.

In 2022-2024 created a lab in San Francisco working on several new projects, including FairShare, which aims to provide a basic income and reduce wealth inequality using a group-based digital currency. Also helped create CIMC.AI, which is exploring consciousness in machines.

Rejoined Second Life in October 2024 as CTO to help with several new initiatives!

Friday 20 March @ 9:00 AM SLT, VWBPE Auditorium

About Ryan Schultz

Ryan Schultz is a science and agriculture librarian at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, who for the past eight years has written a popular blog about virtual worlds, social VR/AR, and the metaverse at RyanSchultz.com.

Saturday 21 March @ 9:00 AM SLT, VWBPE Auditorium

About Mark Childs

Mark Childs is a Senior Learning Designer at the University of Durham (Durham UK). He has researched and taught remote teaching since 1997. His PhD in 2010 was on the subject of the role of presence and embodiment in learning in Second Life. He was also the project manager of the Theatron3 project at King’s College London., which created ancient theatres for performances and teaching theatre studies. His books on virtual worlds are Understanding Learning in Virtual Worlds, Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds, Making Sense of Space, and Reinventing Ourselves – Contemporary Concepts of Identity in Virtual Worlds, half of which were co-edited with Anna Peachey, now Anna Childs. So he has a lot to thank Second Life for.

Gann McGann was rezzed in 2005 when the only choices for surnames were the actors who played the first eight Doctors on Dr Who. He taught extensively in Second Life during the 2000s and early 2010s and has regularly attended events at VWBPE and VWMOOC ever since. He has presented at the Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable and has a more skins than he knows what to do with. His regular look was one he established very early and has been so closely related to his identity within Second Life that he feels it’s too late to change, so he apologises in advance for the light reflecting off his head spikes.