Worlds chat

Worlds Chat was the very first three-dimensional avatar world to become widely available on the Internet, starting in April 1995. A space station world with a range of avatars, but no building or modifying by its users, it nonetheless generated great excitement and became an early precursor to online communities with its breakthrough technology. Amongst the early users of Worlds Chat was Philip Rosedale, who would go on to found Linden Labs and the popular vr chat Second Life. Two months after the launch of Worlds Chat platform, Alphaworld, the early prototype of what would become Active Worlds, was launched online. By allowing users to build by simply picking up and placing pre-built objects, Alphaworld extended the technology developed by the Worlds Chat team from 3Dimensional chat to 3Diminsional building environments. This concept of utilizing pre-built objects to build made it possible to populate 3Dimensional environments with user-generated content and was later adopted by Second Life [ http://www.amazon.com/Avatars-Exploring-Building-Virtual-Internet/dp/0201688409/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223627530&sr=1-1 ] .

Worlds Chat team

The team that put together Worlds Chat, included Dave Leahy, Andrea Gallagher, Wolf Schmidt, Judy Challinger, Syed Asif Hassan, Farshid Meshgali, Kurt Kokko, John Navitsky, Naggi Asmar, David Tolley and many others, inclusing Jeff Robinson (a.k.a. Scamper, the Combat Wombat) and Helen Cho, World Chat's first artist.

Prior to April 1995 the team had been doing corporate demos, but these had never been widely distributed or tested. In April 1995, Worlds Chat, was created order to test multi-user technology and as an active laboratory of what the Worlds Chat servers could do. Worlds founder Dave Gobel was interested in the social computing aspects of the technology, and it was jointly decided that a good application of the technology would be to provide a 3D graphical parallel to the IRC and other chat popular on the Internet as of January 1995. The first WC which came out in April 1995 went through several versions on the client side, with occasional changes to the server and protocol. The user base went from hundreds to thousands-plus, proving the supporting technology robust enough to scale to accommodate larger numbers of simultaneous users.

References

http://www.amazon.com/Avatars-Exploring-Building-Virtual-Internet/dp/0201688409/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223627915&sr=1-1

External Links

http://www.digitalspace.com/avatars/book/fullbook/chwc/chwc1.htm

http://www.vwtimeline.org/