Futurist Kurzweil to give GDC 08 keynote

The organisers of the 2008 Game Developers Conference have announced that Ray Kurzweil will be giving a keynote speech entitled "The Next 20 Years of Gaming."

Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame in 2002, and was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

PBS named him as one of 16 revolutionary inventors who made America, he was ranked number eight by Inc. magazine among US entrepreneurs, and has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes.

"Bringing the future to life today has always been at the heart of the game industry, so it's essential to have our vision refreshed by one of our greatest living thinkers," said GDC executive director Jamil Moledina.

"As a technology inventor and prophetic visionary, Ray Kurzweil is that rare individual who can inspire the next evolutionary step forward in what games can do."

GDC 2008 will be taking place in San Francisco, California from February 18-22.