David Smith “The Augmented Conversation”

Greetings PCI Community – our guest speaker this Sunday 24 July is David Smith, Founder and CTO of Croquet.

His topic: “The Augmented Conversation”

Doug Engelbert expressed the idea of augmenting human intellect, not just for individuals, but as a collaborative experience. We have been working on Croquet, with the goal of creating a foundation that would enable such an augmentation of our ability to create, explore, understand and solve problems collaboratively.  We define the augmented conversation as follows:

1) A discussion within a group of users that is extraordinarily enhanced with the kinds of tools and capabilities that are only available with a computer.

2) A computer AI is a full participant in this conversation. It allows us to jointly discuss and explore complex systems, data sets, and simulations as naturally and easily as we engage today.

3) There is a guarantee of shared truth. The simulation I see must be the exact same as what you see. Anything I do to affect the shared simulation must also be accurately shared. If this is not the case, then there is no guarantee that what you see and understand is the same as for me, so you are unable to trust that communication channel.

David believes in the very near future virtual objects will soon populate our world will be as responsive and alive as a physical object. There won’t be a physical reality and a virtual or augmented reality. Soon and in development now, there will only be a seamless, multi-user reality.

About David A. Smith | CEO/Founder Croquet Corporation

David Alan Smith Smith is the CTO and Founder of Croquet Corporation, developing the Croquet Web-based Operating System.

Smith is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who has focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment. He built his first human machine design (HMD) in 1986 to study telepresence control of a remote robot arm using a Dataglove.

Smith was a Senior Fellow at Lockheed Martin, where he focused on next generation human centric computing and collaboration platforms. Before that, Smith was the chief architect of the Croquet Project, an open-source virtual world collaboration platform where he worked with Alan Kay (Turing Award) and David P Reed (created UDP, co-created TCP/IP) and Andreas Raab (Squeak Smalltalk co-developer).

In 1987, Smith created The Colony, the first real time 3D adventure game/shooter. Smith developed Virtus Walkthrough in 1990, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers. Smith also co-founded Red Storm Entertainment with author Tom Clancy and co-created the Rainbow Six game franchise. David gave the keynote address at IEEE VR 2017.

You will receive a meeting notice with connection information later today from PCI Guests & Speakers Committee member Kacey Komloski.

Please join us.