About Speaker

Mike Lorrey has a long history with virtual worlds. As an editor of the Neal Stephenson Quicksilver Metaweb Wiki, he helped flesh out the virtual world of the novel Snow Crash and other works of fiction by Stephenson, who himself coined the terms "metaverse", "avatar" and "grid" as applied to VR/VW. A military veteran, Mike was a member of the Extropy Institute which pioneered a lot of early VR concepts. In 2006 he joined Second Life and quickly built one of the largest estates on the grid, developed the first virtual stock exchanges, and was the most frequent guest on the popular TreetTV show, Metanomics. Mike, through his exchange, capitalized the first commercial Opensim grid, Central Grid, and members of his team were part of the original LibSL group that built the tools that made Opensim possible. Mike also has extensive experience in aerospace and currently serves as Chairman of the Exhibits Committee of the International Spaceflight Museum, a Texas based 501c3 nonprofit that has facilities in both SL and the OS grid of Kitely.com.