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News and Events

Upcoming Events, Contests, Competitions and Exhibitions

Siggraph 2004
Conference 8-12 August and the Exhibition 10-12 August
more details here

CONTACT, March 12-14, 2004
"Cyberspace meets Outerspace: Visiting Mars (Virtually)" and Avatars 2004
This year at CONTACT, the Contact Consortium and DigitalSpace will be hosting the Avatars cyber event Avatars2004.. AvaMars! in the new Adobe Atmosphere web-based virtual worlds platform. For the first time since the Contact Consortium's first special event at CONTACT in 1996, the annual event of these two organizations will be held together. The Avatars conference is in its eighth year and the sixth held as an online virtual event. AvaMars will present 3D renditions of Mars Exploration Rover terrains,traverses and vehicles which have been produced with publicly available mission data. During the event to be presented on-screen to CONTACT, educators, scientists, students and artists from around the world will explore a virtual Mars using their avatar online personae. In AvaMars we will be offering experiences including special guests speakers and tours of visualizations of Mars fantastic, past and future with views of Lowell's canals, and hypothetical Martian oceans from a future (or past) Blue Mars.

Details on this event are available at the Contact Consortium pages at www.ccon.org, DigitalSpace at www.digitalspace.com, and on our special event site, www.DriveOnMars.com.

Latest Event Report
SIGGRAPH 2003 Read Beth Marchants article "Success on the small screen." Software, hardware and display news from Siggraph 2003 PDF Format click here

Contests, Competitions and Exhibitions

AVATARS 2004: AvaMars Design Competition

Fantastic 3D Visions of Mars Past and Future
Deadline: March 8, 2004

Entries will be shown and judged at CONTACT 2004, March 12-14, NASA Ames Research Center

Contact: Bernard Farkin

Competition and Conference homepage: http://www.ccon.org/conf04/AvaMars.html

From H.G. Wells to Kim Stanley Robinson, from the Martian Chronicles to Moving Mars, the planet Mars has had many visitors of the imagination. This year with the dual NASA rovers exploring the surface of the Red Planet, CONTACT and the Contact Consortium will be holding joint events at NASA's Ames Research Center in California and on the Internet on March 12-14th with the theme "The Challenge of Mars: Past, Present, and Future". The Consortium will hold its 9th annual online cyber-conference, AVATARS2004: AvaMars inside the newly released Adobe Atmosphere web-based multi-user virtual environments platform. Digital Space has partnered with the Consortium to produce the AvaMars event through its projects and contacts at NASA and created a special project site www.DriveOnMars.com which allows web visitors to drive a virtual mars rover through traverses on a digitally re-created Red Planet.

The AvaMars Design Competion: Fantastic 3D Visions of Mars Past and Future

We are inviting 3D artists to populate the virtual landscapes with their animated rovers at www.DriveOnMars.com with visions of Mars past and future from CONTACT science fiction authors including Greg Bear, G. David
Nordley, Kim Stanley Robinson and others. Did you love reading about Martian oceans and giant diatoms in Greg Bear's "Moving Mars"? Realize it in Cyberspace by designing creatures in Adobe Atmosphere and Viewpoint 3D formats. So you loved Kim Stanley Robinson's Red, Green and Blue Mars books and want to realize some of the human habitation depicted there? Author a great 3D recreation of a settlement and submit it to our competition. Any visions of Martian landscapes, creatures or structures are fair game for the competition (even your own creations).

At the CONTACT conference on March 12-14th, 2004 a VIP team of science fiction authors, space scientists and anthropologists will judge the entries and nominate the ones deemed "most fantastic", "most plausible scientifically", "most true to their fictional counterpart" and "goshdarned most funy". On Saturday March 13th (11:30am US Pacific Time) we will present www.DriveOnMars.com to the CONTACT conference attendees and feature the winning entries which will be placed into those worlds and "discovered" by our dual virtual MER rovers.

Contact Bernard Farkin to register for the competition and receive any additional guidance. Find more information on the event home page at: http://www.ccon.org/conf04/AvaMars.html
Thank you and let the creativity begin,
The AVATARS2004: AvaMars! Team

WEB3DART 2004

DEADLINE: Monday, 19 January 2004
Submit your on-line 3D works to WEB3DART 2004, for inclusion in an exhibition of completely new works created by internationally regarded artists, architects, designers, students and creative 3D developers. The selection will showcase the foremost ideas and independent creations in all on-line 3D formats. Submission form is available at: http://www.web3dart.org
Atmospherians > News and Events > Upcoming Events and Contests