ARE 2010

I was incredibly honored to be asked to keynote the ARE2010 conference alongside Will Wright and Bruce Sterling. Highlights for me were getting a chance to talk to those guys, and also getting to meet Rudy Rucker! I had a weird moment where I asked Rudy if he'd heard the announcement Japan has made that they are going to create an outpost of autonomous robots on the moon in 2020, and he just smiled and said, "No, I hadn't heard that." (See, that's the premise of Software, maybe his best known book.)

Anyway, the conference was really cool. I learned a lot about what is going on in the AR world. It really had a feeling like we were at the beginning of something great, like we'd look back one day at that modest gathering, and shake our heads at how naive we were. A bunch of us went out for dinner at the end, and placed bets about how many years this conference will last -- will there be an ARE2020? Most people said 3-5 years... but I don't know... I think that maybe it could go much, much longer.

You can see (crude) recordings of the keynote speeches here: I was really proud at how my talk came off... with one regret -- I had a poem I was going to read to set up the ending, but I was nervous that it would come off corny, or make me go over time. Looking back, I wish I had done it. I hope one day I get a chance to give this talk again.