Why OWorld?

In the 1990s, early examples of 2-D and 3-D graphical virtual spaces began to appear on the Internet. Many were venture-backed projects that failed to find commercial success or a significant user base. Some virtual world platforms flourished as small-scale community spaces and supported well-regarded experiments in learning. Those working on creating new on-line experiences considered the Black Sun and the Metaverse in general — brought to their imagination through the novel Snow Crash. As a new millennium approached, a grand vision of a unified competitive, yet collaborative, virtual world Cyberspace seemed in danger of never becoming a reality, if left solely to commercial interests.

Inspired by platform efforts such as VRML and Java3D, which played nice with Web architecture standards proliferating infrastruture, many skilled developers were finding the path easier and easier to cook up their own world platforms in their garages (you may have been one of them!). Like the original Home Brew computer club which gave birth to the personal computer 24 years ago, the OWorld community brought together visionaries, developers and users of a whole new generation of net-based virtual spaces — hoping you could move fluidly among platforms with a coherent identity you creatively designed and maintained.

The Medium of Multi-User Virtual Worlds

OWorld mission suggested the time was ripe for an "open" virtual worlds movement. Graphics, networks, and processors begged us to pioneer Cyberspace as a shared computing playfield. The future of Cyberspace seemed wide open and early adopters would have a great opportunity to stake a claim as to what it would become. When motion pictures were invented, the first movies were made by placing the camera on a tripod in an auditorium, and filming a traditional play. It was some time before directors realized the scope of the new technology and unfettered it from traditional constraints. We were following a similar script — by creating shared virtual environments that look like caricatures of the physical world. Certainly things were evolve from there... no?

The limitations imposed on movement and appearance in a virtual world are very different from those of real-world physics and spatial geometry. Perhaps computational requirements take the place of energy or thermodynamics. Just what global characteristics are desirable — should we simulate gravity or employ arbitrary frames of reference? Can avatars and other objects pass through each other without hindrance? Can there be more than three spatial dimensions? How do we treat size and scale — can objects or agents shrink or expand at will?

We believed issues like these should be examined, at the dawning of OWorlds, so that we could explore and realize their potential more readily within a creative commons of practitioners.