community based effort focusing on Open Source platforms
for a shared 3-D Cyberspace.

Organized in 1998 to rally interesting people together for the Digital Biota 3 conference, OWorld then took on a life of its own. At first the O in OWorld referred as much to Organic as it did to Open. Digital Biota is cool and many want to organize cyberspace around its merits, but OWorld needs to get there in steps. Our first phase focused on building software components with which cyberspace participants could easily move from one 3-D platform to the next while experiencing a fluid and connected landscape.

OWorld 2014 Update: Digital Biota 4 took place in 2001. Plans for a Biota 5 in 2013 did not come to fruition but OWorld spirit continues to live in the CONTACT 2014 conference as it does every CONTACT conference (from where OWorld was birthed).

OWorld 2003 Update: OWorlds 2003, the code release summit took place February 8-10, 2003 in Boulder Creek, CA. The community demonstrated four projects that would be included in the first release of the OWorld collaboration tools suite: Meetingpage, Meetingspace, Drawspace, and Chatspace. Corporate friends demonstrated their 3-D servers and renderers and agreed they would be interested in implementing OWorld API's. Adobe contributed their Community Server to OWorld (details here).

OWorld Year-End 2002 Update: Open Source Code to available here April 2nd, 2003. See our Projects link for more details.

OWorld spread the word through this website, a now-defunt OWorld mailing list, software and documentation downloads, and an occasional conference (the last taking place in 2002). We believe that OWorld developers should be able to meet within 3-D cyberspace using their own platforms and we're working on that as priority number one. A developer world entry point was to be available on this page once development and testing were complete (guestimated completion date was 6/1/2001). Second Life fulfilled some of our mission.

OWorld 2000 Summary: The OWorld community last met in person for four days in September 2000 at the Digital Garden in Boulder Creek, CA. The meeting became known as the OWorlds 2000 Architecture Summit.

OWorld 2000 discussions were lively as attendees discussed shared values and ideas to focus and drive a shared vision. Picture after picture appeared on flip-charts as guests dropped by and refined architectural diagrams. The design still needed some more work, but the OWorld Component Architecture was put through its paces and seemed to deliver a reasonable solution. The vision strives to build an architecture that spurs on both competition and collaboration.

OWorld was introduced in 1999 at Biota 3. Want more details? Check out the OWorld Conference Programs | OWorld Page Hits