Internationally recognized as the man who brought virtual reality into the World Wide Web, Mark Pesce has been exploring the frontiers of the future for two decades. A well-respected journalist, Pesce has written for WIRED, Feed Magazine, Salon Magazine, and numerous Ziff-Davis periodicals. Pesce's next book, The Playful World: Interactive Toys and the Future of Imagination, which examines the changing world of children's entertainments, will be published by Ballantine Books in September 2000.

Mark Pesce is a cyberspace researcher and theorist. After spending a decade working in data communications, he left Shiva Corporation in 1991 to co-found Ono-Sendai Corporation, an early virtual reality company. After leaving Ono-Sendai in 1993, Mr. Pesce began work on Labyrinth, the prototype for Virtual Reality Modeling Language. In 1994 he established the VRML mailing list on the Internet, as a forum for the public discussion of all issues relating to the advancement of VRML. Over the following two years, Mr. Pesce helped the VRML grow into a full-fledged community, with outposts in academia, commerce, and a world wide network of enthusiasts. In 1995, New Riders Publishing released Mr. Pesce's first book, VRML, Browsing and Building Cyberspace, critically hailed as an easily understood introduction to the subject. A sought-after lecturer, Mr. Pesce has had the privledge of being an invited speaker at all five International World Wide Web conferences.

www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce

The Real World

A broadly networked world can offer more than just a static view of planet Earth. Every day, the number of webcams is increasing, more portholes into reality are opening up - through cyberspace. It is already technical possible to integrate the thousands of webcams into an integrated, synthetic view; it would then become possible to travel to nearly any populous corner of the Earth, and look upon it, both virtually and in reality. Why would we want to engage in such navel-gazing? Buckminister Fuller hypothesized that his Geoscope would help human beings to grasp not only the size of the Earth, but its complexity. He believed that a comprehensive change in human behavior could only come from a broad understanding of how human civilization works - and that could only come from an experience of humanity at its most comprehensive level. Perhaps we don't need to play the "what if" game. Could it be that we are ready to take the final step, to create a simulation within which we could simulate the real world?