As many of you know, one of the growth areas for new technology companies in New York City is in the Computer Game and Animation fields (see the NYC Future report, http://www.nycfuture.org/images_pdfs/pdfs/GettingInTheGame.pdf ). One company in this field, Actor Machine, stands out in both it's technology and it's team. Actor Machine is creating next-generation core technology for character animation based on some of Ken Perlin's non-academic inventions (for those who aren't familiar with Ken Perlin, read below). Our speaker, Gerry Seidman, is founder of Actor Machine and is both a well known technologist in his own right, but also has extensive entrepreneurial experience founding and participating in many startup ventures across multiple industries.

As many of you already know, much of the 3D animation and gaming industry will soon be shifting to a new way to create and animate 3D characters. This trend may also lead to an explosion in user-created animated content, which could have a transformative impact on public venues for the distribution of user-created content such as YouTube.

Digital Character Actor Technology

Actor MachineTM is pioneering the field of ADA (Autonomous Digital Actors) by developing technologies that allow the creation and directing of emotive digital actors that can be used in linear animation (film/pre-visualization), games, virtual worlds, simulations or live (real time) performances. The core Actor Machine Engine can be embedded in linear animation tools, such as a Maya Plugin or custom pre-visualization tool, or within in interactive entertainment applications (Game, virtual world, etc) for real time animation.

About the Talk

Gerry's talk will in many ways be two talks. One will be on the Actor Machine technology. The other will be talking to the issues of starting up a technology company and the business rational for the decisions and approach Actor Machine has taken from ther perspective of his experience with starting other companies in completely different industries.

ABOUT THE TECHNOLOGISTS
Gerry Seidman, CEO
Gerry first foray into startup businesses was in the 1980?s when he was the lead software architect for a robotics product line distributed by Union Carbide. Skipping forward a bit to the 1990?s, he founded IAM Consulting, one of the first Java Training and Consulting companies, and was CEO of Internet Access Methods, a software company specializing in Real-Time Interactive technologies, Collaborative User Interfaces and Distance Presentation. He is a well-respected expert in distributed dynamic systems and next generation P2P technologies, and is the developer of a highly distributed/reliable custom clustered server product in the telecom industry that scales up to ten billion messages/day.

Ken Perlin, Chief Technology Advisor
While Ken Perlin will not be at the talk, much of the technology discussed/shown is based on inventions exclusively created for Actor Machine. Ken was one of the early pioneers of Computer Graphics in Film/FX going back to 1982, creating the ground breaking software for TRON. He is both an academy award winner and this year is receiving the highest professional award in the field of computer graphics, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award.