January 2004: "NASA Rovers land on Mars", DigitalSpace lands virtual rovers on DriveOnMars.com. Also this year at CONTACT, the Contact Consortium and DigitalSpace will be hosting the Avatars cyber event Avatars2004.. AvaMars!



February 2004: Patrik Svensson's hardy band of explorers are testing embedded MeetingPage up in the Arctic Circle - in northern Sweden.
Go to http://blog.humlab.umu.se/jokkmokk2004/index.html and keep them company, and Read our report here



February 2004: Predicting the Future of AI.
Bruce Damer appears on TechTV on the PC Prophesy edition of "The Screen Savers" See the interview on movie (quicktime format) here, and read the article by Bruce on the techtv site

March 2004: Contact 2004 The Challenge of Mars: Past, Present, Future... was held on the12th-14th, see our gallery of images from the event



April 1, 2004: DigitalSpace and a great group of Traveler citizens hosted Noel Paul Stookey in "A Virtual Party", a special event held in Traveler in honor of Noel's new album "Virtual Party".

May 24, 2004: Bruce Damer of DigitalSpace and Maarten Sierhuis of NASA were quoted in the Wall Street Journal in a special article by Jeanette Borzo: Almost Human: Using avatars for corporate training, advocates say, can combine the best parts of face-to-face interaction and computer-based learning (WSJ Membership required). We present the relevant excerpt below:

A Glimpse of the Future

Even more realism is expected in avatar-based training in the near future. Avatar-based training used in military and space-exploration training already involves far more-realistic, three-dimensional views and avatar movements than what can be seen now on corporate desktops.

"Eventually this technology comes down to industry,' says Bruce Damer, president and chief executive officer at DigitalSpace Inc. of Santa Cruz, Calif., which is working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on avatar programs. 'It trickles down.'

One simulation developed by DigitalSpace and NASA represents life in the polar conditions of Mars. You can enter the virtual environment as an avatar that isn't part of the simulation, to simply observe the living and working conditions, says Maarten Sierhuis, a NASA scientist. In another mode, he says, 'you can participate as one of the crew members in the simulation, working alongside and together with other avatars. We envision that this is more the training model that we aspire to create.'";

This excerpt is (c) 2004 Copyright Wall Street Journal, All Rights Reserved.

November 2004: DigitalSpace awarded Phase II and Phase I SBIR projects by NASA to create a universal model repository for simulation based acquisition visualization and to simulate a teleoperated lunar bucket wheel excavator.