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'Nature' has just published one of its projects, the EU gave it a million-dollar subsidy... Diego Gutiérrez is an eminence in virtual reality who loves his life in Zaragoza
He holds his gaze like few others before the lens of the camera that photographs him in the corridors of the old CPS, with its cold and concise architecture. Diego Gutiérrez (Zaragoza, 1970) crosses his arms and without blinking, obeys with a strange firmness. "For almost 10 years I worked as security at concerts," he explains. "I started with the one that Julio Iglesias gave in the Romareda in 1993, and the next one was the one by Iron Maden in Barcelona. The one that caused the most problems was the one with the Backstreet Boys, with the girls who were suffocating. I really liked the one rock, AC/DC, Metallica..., classic rock. And Bruce Springsteen: one of the best concerts I have seen was the one in Zaragoza (1999)", remembers this imposing-looking man, due to his height (1,88), her long hair as a sign of identity, as maximum evidence of what is superfluous in the face of science. Professor in the Area of Computer Languages and Systems, he is an international eminence in virtual reality, a world to which he arrived, luckily, thanks to the little interest that the Industrial Engineering career sparked in him, the revolutionary arrival of Toy Story and the long-term of his concern for science and space developed over the years in the readings of a decisive magazine: National Geographic.
Science as progress
After his media exposure in 2016, his life returned to research.
Yes, but I'm not complaining about that, anyway, not at all because it is good to disseminate science, and you have your moments and circumstances to take advantage of them. To tell what is done and for people to understand that in Spain, in Zaragoza, very cool things are done. It is true that when you have such important funding it is attractive to the media, and I am delighted that this was the case, but not because of a personal ego but because it was an opportunity to disseminate science, which is fundamental for the development of everything, not only a country, but of the person themselves, of the human being. Without science there is no progress in anything.
These years of crisis it has been very abandoned.
Children must be motivated, challenged so that they have dreams, hopes or goals beyond everyday things. A very typical example is when the United States reached the pinnacle in technology, which it is now losing, and which was largely due to its push for the space race. They said to themselves: "We have to put a man on the Moon in ten years," and that generated a lot of hope for jobs, engineers, inventions, scientists. That is the spark we need, goals beyond the immediate that motivate a society, and that Spain does not do well. It is seen in all areas. When we ask the Ministry for projects, they are small, three years because they almost always ask for return on investment, which companies are interested... All of that is fantastic but it should have a program with longer vision, like 'we are going to put a man on the Moon ' that does not require the immediacy of a return. We must have large, open goals that over time generate a foundation of science on which application technology is built.
