Earth to Avatars, The first annual Contact Consortium Conference on Contact, Culture and Community in Digital Space, was held on October 26 and 27 in San Francisco, California USA. This first ever event on Avatar Cyberspace was a milestone in the evolution of the Internet into a medium for human contact and community.

A Powerful Program

Session topics included: avatar standards, designing and building virtual worlds, virtual community, worlds for learning, worlds for electronic commerce, digital culture, digital biology, and the best in inhabited virtual worlds on the Internet. Over seventy speakers! including the movers and shakers of the virtual worlds movement filled our program. See some scenes from E2A in our Photo Gallery.

Participation from the Whole Community

Participating companies and organizations included: 3-D Labs, 3rd Dimension, America Online, Anthrobotics, Apple, BigBook, Black Sun Interactive, Chaco, Construct Internet Design, Duck Soup, Electric Communities, Fujitsu Software Corporation, IBM, IDS, Intervista, Intel, Interval Research, ITU Research, KATrix, L-Squared, Microsoft, NTT Software, OnLive!, Oz Interactive, Paragraph, The Palace, Planet 9 Studios, Velocity Games, VeRGe, The WELL, Worlds Incorporated, Zenda.. and more!

The conference was held over two days, October 26-27, 1996 at the ANA Hotel in the heart of San Francisco and the Multimedia Gulch.