Bruce Damer, Stuart Gold
Contact Consortium
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Santa Cruz CA 95062-2305 USA
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Bibliographic Reference:
Published in the proceedings of Virtual Worlds and Simulation Conference (VWSIM '99), Christopher Landauer and Kirstie Bellman, Editors, SCS (Society for Computer Simulation) Simulation Series, ISBN 1-56555-157-5, pp. 136-140.

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• Introduction


• Roots of the Medium


• Technical Underpinnings: how do you build a world?


• TheU Virtual University Architecture Competition


• The Future of the Medium


• References
  

Introduction

Since 1995, the Internet has played host to a dozen different emergent technologies supporting two- and three-dimensional multi-user graphical virtual worlds. These spaces have been shared and bear the marks of tens of thousands of users who enter them daily, each donning a digital embodiment known as an ‘avatar’. Avatar is an ancient Sanskrit term meaning 'a god’s embodiment on the Earth' and was first applied to online personification by Chip Morningstar in the Habitat project in 1985 (Farmer 1991). Our organization, the Contact Consortium, was established in 1995 to serve as a catalyst within online virtual worlds, stimulating their evolution, and experimenting with practical uses for these shared spaces, especially in the area of learning. Our special interest groups concentrate their efforts on social/creative virtual worlds rather than gaming spaces. These worlds have typically relied on the inhabitants themselves to build up the community structure, economies, and visual virtual real estate, rather than presenting a more limiting content prescribed by a small set of designers. The relative openness of one virtual world platform, Active Worlds, by Circle of Fire Studios of Newburyport, Massachusetts, led us to select it for a learning experiment called TheU Virtual University. This paper will briefly detail the roots and technical underpinnings of the online graphical virtual world, will give an overview of TheU project, and will conclude with some thoughts on the future of virtual worlds in cyberspace.


Roots Of The Medium


Virtual community finds its technological roots in the earliest text-based multi-user games, such as Space War, a popular application within the early development of Unix. Continuing this trend was the development of UseNET, LISTSERVs, MUDs, MOOs, IRC and conferencing systems like the WELL in the 1970s and ‘80s (Rheingold 1993), and the World Wide Web and its many progeny in the ‘90s. The merging of text-based chat channels with a visual interface in which users were represented as 'avatars' occurred first in Habitat in the mid-1980s (Benedikt 1991) and reached an important watermark with the launch of the 3D Internet-based Worlds Chat in the spring of 1995. Although one would suppose that the rise of 'inhabited' 2D and 3D visual spaces in cyberspace would have been heavily influenced by the prior example of Virtual Reality (VR) systems and be closely connected with the development of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), this was not the case. Inhabited Virtual Worlds and their communities drew primarily from their roots in MUDs and text-based real-time chat systems, and they utilized the power of existing 3D rendering engines developed for gaming applications, such as Doom and Quake. Next, online virtual worlds do not take advantage of the full immersion and special devices of VR systems but instead concentrate on running effectively on a large range of consumer computing platforms at modem speeds.

Figure 1: Generated 'satellite' view of the Alphaworld cityscape, December 1996
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Technical Underpinnings: How Do You Build a World?

The technology involved in serving up an inhabited virtual world experience is extensive and impressive: from robust client-server architectures, to streaming 3D object models, to tricks dealing with latency, to citizen authorization and crowd control, and finally to databases managing, and mirroring hundreds of millions of objects and thousands of users across networks at modem dial-up speeds. These virtual spaces represent one of the great architectural achievements of computing. We invite you to view the image of one particular cityscape, referenced in figure 1. This 'satellite view' of the Alphaworld cityscape is actually an artful processing of the database of 3D content that were placed down by some of 200,000 users in the first 18 months of operation beginning in the summer of 1995. Currently over 50 million objects occupy Alphaworld, which can be visited by users with ordinary consumer computers 'walking at ground level', streaming in a visible periphery of 3D content over modem connections. The literature surrounding virtual world architectures, community development (Damer 1995, 1996, 1998; Powers 1997) and avatar design (Wilcox 1998) is comprehensive and growing, so we will not treat these topics further here.


TheU Virtual University Architecture Competition


The grandfather organization of the Contact Consortium is CONTACT: Cultures of the Imagination, a group of Anthropologists, space scientists, artists and writers, established in 1982. CONTACT created projects in honor of Gregory Bateson, projects which involved learning through contact exercises with simulated cultures and their worlds. One such Bateson project, SolSys Sim, was created by a team led by Northern Arizona University anthropology professor Reed Riner. In SolSys, separate campus teams of students and virtual consultants designed and documented solar system human civilization projected one hundred years hence and then went live in a MUD text-based simulation of contact between these ‘colonies’ (Riner 1994). SolSys was highly successful as a learning environment, garnering international recognition and graduating scores of dedicated alumni over its eight years of operation.

Birth of an experimental pedagogical virtual world: TheU

Figure 2: San Francisco State University students meeting in TheU University Development Center
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Starting with with students with the University of Toronto Marshall McLuhan Program in Florence Italy in May of 1996, our group set out to build on the legacy of SolSys by creating a learning space appropriate to a 3D online inhabited virtual world. A dedicated Active World server, TheU, was donated to the Contact Consortium for special experimentation in education. The goal of TheU is serve as a test bed combining traditional campus-based universities and the growing number of distance learning projects. Distance offers many advantages to students in remote areas and students attending part-time courses. However it lacks the social interaction and sense of community which can be achieved by sharing environmental spaces and experiences. This technology may trigger the emergence of completely innovative teaching methods.

Given its unique combination of social interaction, visual human embodiment and user definable virtual environments TheU sought to go beyond current networked learning experiments. Playing it safe for our first experiment, we opted to stay with familiar metaphors of a university campus with its instructional spaces, tutorial help centers, social commons, and library reference zones. In order to utilize the power of the Active Worlds builder community, we decided to host a virtual architecture competition thereby generating a range of approaches to using a virtual world in pedagogy. Fortunately for the organization, Stuart Gold, a British architect and database expert with a long involvement in online systems, took the lead in this effort, operating the event as a professional juried competition. For your reference, please visit TheU Virtual University and see the results of the Architecture Competition at http://www.ccon.org/theu/index.html

Competition to Build the First Phase - Institute of Virtual Education

It seems appropriate that the first faculty of TheU should concern itself with the study and application of virtual worlds technology in the field of education. Consequently, in its first phase, the university is the Institute of virtual education. It is hoped that in the early days of applying this new technology, the Institute will attract people from all over the world to debate and take part in the future development of the University and of virtual education in general. The Institute’s role will be to:

• Stimulate and nurture debate on the development of virtual education


• Provide a research facility and forum for the development of virtual worlds technology


• Provide information and instruction on the use of virtual environments


• Act as a governing body for TheU, developing and implementing policy decisions

Aims and Objectives of the Competition

Since the inception of Alpha World, its citizens have produced many stunning and innovative virtual spaces and structures. It therefore seemed appropriate to ask Alpha World citizens to take part in a competition, hosted and sponsored by SRT Enterprises and the Contact Consortium, to design the Institute of virtual education. The goal of the participants was to create a virtual environment which could best meet the following criteria on which it would be judged:

• Suitability and usefulness as a space to house and facilitate the functions of the Institute


• Innovative application of virtual worlds technology and other emergent technologies such as web casting


• Use of space and objects to create a stimulating, aesthetically pleasing and compelling environment

Participants were given a large degree of freedom in their interpretation of the requirements. As the driving technology is so fluid and is constantly evolving, we felt that the participants should evolve their ideas over the period of the competition and have access to a consultative panel of experts, who would also be the judges, via a listserv available to all the entrants. The panel was made up of educators, architects, artists/designers, and technologists including: Murray Turoff from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Marcos Novak from UCLA, Derrick Woodham from the University of Cincinnati, Gerhard Schmitt from the ETH in Zurich, John Tiffin of Florida State, the authors of this paper, and others.

Competition Procedures and Prizes

There were 34 teams, each were given an Active Worlds personal server donated by Circle of Fire and hosted by SRT Enterprises. Each of the servers was configured to allow any Active World user to enter but only one can build in the world. The duration of the competition was around six weeks.

Due to the open-ended nature of the requirements and the emphasis on ideology and innovation, the participants were encouraged to develop one or more web pages, linked to their schemes, which served to describe their designs and the concepts behind them. Participants were encouraged to outline how their designs related to the learning and educational process.

Figure 3: Competition participants, judges and bystanders meet in the pavilion.
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A competition pavilion was constructed in TheU (figure 3) and served as a communal area for all the participants. In it were teleports through which visitors and competition judges could enter each of the worlds.

The Competition

After six weeks of intense building in all 34 competition worlds, six entries were short-listed for serious consideration. On March 20, 1998, the final walk through of the finalist worlds with their builders, the judges and a large group (40 to 50) of observers occurred (see figure 4). This event lasted almost four hours. With any in-world event, careful planning must occur to keep it from degenerating into chaos. The following steps were taken to make this coherent, and obtain value for the participants:

1. The event had a clear structure, advertised from the beginning: meeting in the Pavilion, a tour of the six finalist worlds, with the judges, narrated by the builders of the worlds. Strict control of the pacing, moving on between each world every 20 minutes. A final gathering at the pavilion, voting and announcement of the winners by placing banners in the pavilion for all to see.


2. Assignment of gatekeepers and guides: we had trained world users at the pavilion to guide newcomers and folks who crashed their software, back into the live tour. They used private telegram to stay in constant contact with the event leaders.


3. A pair of event leaders, in charge of herding of attendees, crowd control, discipline of event crashers, communications with gatekeepers and generally keeping the conversation interesting and on track.


4. Documentarians were logging all text chat and taking a continuous series of screen shots of the walk through, which can all be seen at http://www.ccon.org/theu/album-background.html


5. Voting of judges was by secret ballot, sent by telegram and email with follow-up after the event.

Figure 4: Competition judge, Professor Murray Turoff standing outside the Learning Towers of Henrik, in the winning world Aurac
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The winning world Aurac was built by Craig and Penny Twining of Active Arts Design in the UK working with Henrik, a chemical engineer and 3D model constructor from Norway. Figure 4 above shows the 'learning towers of Henrik' being viewed by judge Murray Turoff from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. These towers were built by Henrik to share with others the techniques of constructing objects in the Active Worlds environment.

What was learned

As TheU competition was seen as a following in the footsteps of the original Sherwood Town experiment, we felt we had achieved some major goals including: greater consistency of the event, including clear, published goals, well defined roles and concrete outputs: the winning worlds and their documentation. Did we construct a viable Institute of Virtual Education? Apart from the great aesthetic value of the winning world, Aurac, and its merit for use in demonstrations, it did not serve our needs for the Institute.

The richness of TheU competition environments yielded their own problems: overbuilding created slow frame rate performance and the danger of a 'museum effect', in that the environments became static demonstration areas only. Three valuable principles emerging from this experience were:

1. Do not make your virtual worlds too large. Large spaces can cause users to get lost and provide a scarcity of immediate stimulating objects and other affordances to draw them on to the next activity.


2. Do not design worlds that seek to model real world places, unless those places are particularly suited to support interaction in a virtual environment. Navigation and habitation of virtual spaces is so different than the same activities in a physical setting, that a great deal of wasted objects and real estate can result if one is trying to be faithful to the real world setting. Potemkin villages, theme parks, town squares or shopping malls, designed for denser crowding with plenty to see and do are some of the very few real world models worth emulating in virtual space.


3. Design worlds that are constantly changing and changeable. In fact, the 'ground zero' (default entry area) of TheU has become a major meeting area, filled with the changing detritus of signage, teleports and weblinks from prior events while the 'museum areas' are static and preserved only for narrative tours.

Come Visit TheU

Find TheU Virtual University on the Contact Consortium Homepage at: http://www.ccon.org/theu/index.html. TheU is a frequently used, changing world that will continue to evolve. Visit TheU on the Internet by downloading and installing the Active Worlds Browser http://www.activeworlds.com, starting the program while connected to the internet, and then selecting TheU from the listing of worlds on the left hand side of the interface.

The Future of the Medium

Inhabited Visual Virtual Worlds are a medium in search of an application. At a July 1998 Avatar conference in Banff, Alberta, Canada, a consensus emerged that it was too early in the medium to know how it would ultimately be used. It was felt that it was good that a 'killer app' had not been identified and that 'avatar cyberspace' had time to continue to evolve for its own sake and not to serve possibly inappropriate applications. Comparisons were made to the birth of important technological media of the past century. The telephone was first thought of as a way to distribute music, early film was first cast as a facsimile of theater, and the radio was considered as a method for the delivery of lectures and person to person two-way communication between communities.

Virtual worlds are currently split into multi million dollar efforts in multi-player gaming and smaller social creative spaces supported as research efforts or by die-hard builders of home-brewed DigitalSpaces. Millions of computer users have been only recently acclimatized to using classic windows and icons desktop metaphors. Those users are now comfortable in dealing in a cyberspace made up of lists of text, and documents in the form of the Web. Another generation, brought up on Doom, Quake, Nintendo 64 and other environments that stress navigation through very complex, 3D spaces full of behaviors, may be more apt to demand a cyberspace that is built around the metaphor of a place, not just an interface. Will that generation bring us more into virtual worlds for play, learning, work and just being? What will cyberspace look like in ten years, like Gibson’s Matrix or Stevenson’s Metaverse (Gibson 1984, Stephenson 1992) or will the document based web and streaming video and audio spaces be the dominant paradigm?

References

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