Ray Kurtweil was the keynote speaker for GDC 2008 today, a futurist and inventor, and while he's a very enthusiastic speaker, I wasn't quite sure if he was the right person to be a keynote speaker for the GDC, as very little of his keynote was actually focused about games -- even though the talk was titled "The Next Twenty Years of Gaming", he talked mostly about technology, and how the adoption rate of technology is fast, and progress of technology is fast, and how he as a student at MIT in the 60s chose to go there because MIT had their own computer, and how that computer cost 11 million dollars, and how the price-performance of a modern cellphone in comparison is about a billion times better -- the processor is a million times cheaper, and yet thousands of times more powerful, and all that progress has happened within the last 40 years.
Part of the problem, Kurtzweil explains, is that humans tend to think linearly, and not exponentially -- this is why the sudden growth of technology like the internet came as such a surprise to many people -- first it didn't seem to be growing very quickly, and then boom, it was everywhere. Nanotechnology and immersive VR were things that he said we should be seeing within a few years, and he seems to believe that the extension of life expectancy is within our grasp.
Kurtzweil demonstrated two pieces of technology that got thunderous applause; the first was a program on a cellphone that took a picture of text, performed some OCR and then read the words out loud to assist blind people, and the second was an audio translation program that translated English to French.
In the past, GDC has managed to have games industry heavyweights make keynote addresses at the conference; this year's speakers have been somewhat of a disappointment -- while I enjoyed hearing Kurtzweil speak, he seemed to geared towards the Wired crowd, rather than the gamers, and the Microsoft VP of Live (yesterday's keynote) is just pretty unexciting -- because when it's Microsoft giving the keynote, you know that inevitably it turns to a advertising pitch.
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