Dipity
The Open Grid Public Beta program is a Linden Lab sponsored opportunity for developers to make their virtual worlds interoperate with Second Life. Virtual world interoperability is enabled through ...
IBM and Linden Lab announced that research teams from the two companies successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life Preview Grid into a virtual world running on an OpenSim server, marking ...
Vivaty brings together your friends, photos, and videos in a personal virtual scene in the browser. Hang out and chat with Facebook friends, or jump from scene to scene to check out your friends’ l...
3DXPlorer is an online platform for designing interactive 3D web pages and virtual worlds including 3D spaces and 3D objects, in which web visitors can walk, visualize objects and interact as easil...
SmallWorlds is a 3D virtual world that runs inside your web browser. It enables you to build your own room, house, or even your own world, and fill it with a wide variety of items and fun activitie...
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explor...
Rainbows End is a 2006 science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. It was awarded the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The book is set in San Diego in 2025, in a variation of the fictional world Vinge ex...
Teen Second Life is a version of Second Life reserved for teenagers, running on the so-called "Teen Grid." It was officially opened to the public on February 14th, 2005 for people aged 13-17 to pla...
IMVU is a 3D graphical instant messenger client, but it shares several features with other virtual worlds. IMVU users are represented by an avatar (often abbreviated to avi and avie). The basic ava...
Avatars2004: Avamars cyberconference held in multiple virtual worlds platforms with a physical location at the annual CONTACT conference at NASA's Ames Research Center. Theme: virtual worlds, space...
Adobe Atmosphere is a development platform for Web based virtual worlds. Version 1.0 was released in February 2004 and was discontinued in December 2004 much to the disappointment of its user based...
Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications on multiple operating systems and devices. Derived ...
There is a venue for socializing with less role-playing than is typically found in MMORPGs. Billed on its homepage as "...an online getaway where you can hang out with your friends and meet new one...
Second Life (abbreviated as SL) is an Internet-based virtual world launched on June 23, 2003, developed by Linden Research, Inc (commonly referred to as Linden Lab), which came to international att...
Entropia Universe is a massively multiplayer online virtual universe designed by Swedish software company MindArk, based in Gothenburg. In contrast to other similar MMORPGs, MindArk's software is d...
Avatars2002: A Marry Cyber Party cyberconference is held in avatar cyberspace and at several IRL locations across the planet.
AVATARA, documentary about Traveler and its inahbitants (2003) by 536 Productions of Vancouver, BC, Canada. Note that in the introductory audio dialogue, the speaker mentions the date of 1993, more...
The brainchild of Will Wright of Maxis, which was bought by Electronic Arts.
Vlearn3D 2002: Building Blocks for Virtual Worlds, 5th annual conference on virtual worlds and learning.
Video of Bruce Damer presenting avatars at Pop!Tech Conference, Sept 2002.
Pelican Crossing is leading provider of technology for creating and viewing Web based virtual worlds and was founded in Jan 2002. The companies products include: Blink 3D, a virtual worlds develo...
Vlearn3D 2001: Knowledge Space & Information Landscapes, the 4th Annual Conference on virtual worlds and learning.
Avatars2001: A Cyber Space Odyssey cyberconference is held in multiple virtual worlds across Cyberspace and at several physical locations globally.
Bonnie deVarco: Virtual Vincent - Nicholas deVarco in Van Gough World - Active Worlds (2001)
Andrew Linden and James Linden managed to get a build running of Second Life circa August 2001. They called it “LindenWorld”. Their first human-like avatar was called “primitar”. Previous versions...
A Walking Tour of Adobe Atmosphere produced in July 2001 by DigitalSpace for the SIGGRAPH 2001 conference in August 2001.
Avatars2000: Cyberspace for a New Millennium cyberconference is held in multiple virtual worlds platforms and in various in-person locations worldwide.
Vlearn3D 2000: Live 3D, Learn 3D, the 3rd conference held in-world and at locations at UC Santa Cruz, California and Cornell University, New York State.
Shout Interactive: Demo Reel of Shout3D (2000, exact date unknown).
Avatars99: Colonizing CyberSpace is held in multiple virtual worlds platforms and at physical locations "jacked in" from all over the world.
VLearn: Second Workshop on Virtual Worlds in Formal and Informal Education held in-world and at locations at UC Santa Cruz, California, and Cornell University, New York State.
The film is loosely based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye and the German mini-series Welt am Draht (World on Wires) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The plot parallels with well known ex...
Vlearn: Track at Avatars98, inaugural event of the VLearn3D special interest group of the Contact Consortium focused on learning in virtual worlds.
Avatars98: Inside Cyberspace, the world's first online, graphical multi-user cyber-conferences is held in multiple virtual worlds platforms and with multiple physical "nodes" on five continents.
Virtual UC Santa Cruz documentary (Summer 1998)
Bonnie DeVarco Touring Virtual UC Santa Cruz (Summer 1998).
Bruce Damer presenting avatars at UC Santa Cruz, May 7, 1998 (Part 1)
Bruce Damer presenting avatars at UC Santa Cruz, May 7, 1998 (Part 2)
DigitalSpace: Datafusion World featuring Videotars in a Business Meeting Room (April 1998)
Avatars97 Conference is held in San Francisco CA on October 22-24, 1997, at SFSU Multimedia Studies Program.
Active Worlds leaves Beta. Active Worlds (AW) is a 3D virtual reality platform. The "Active Worlds Browser" runs on Windows and Linux (using Wine). Users assign themselves a unique name, log into ...
"Otherland - City of Golden Shadow" is the first of a series of four science fiction (cyberpunk) novels written by Tad Williams depicting a future where virtual worlds are not distinguishable from ...
Contact Consortium: Communities & Culture panel @ Earth to Avatars Conference (Oct 27, 1996) featuring Linda Stone, Microsoft, Jim Bumgardner, The Palace, Incorporated, Judith Rubin, Fujitsu, and h...
John Sculley & Bruce Damer Keynotes @ Earth to Avatars Conference (Oct 26, 1996).
Contact Consortium: Part 1: Applications of Virtual Environments Panel @ Earth to Avatars Conference (Oct 26, 1996). Hosted by Dave Marvit, and featuring speakers Maclen Marvit (Worlds Incorporated...
Contact Consortium: Mark Pesce & Tony Parisi Keynotes @ Earth to Avatars Conference (Oct 26, 1996).
The Earth to Avatars conference, the first conference on avatars and virtual worlds, was held by the Contact Consortium in San Francisco on Oct 26th-27th, 1996.
Microsoft Chat, formerly known as Comic Chat, was initially released on Internet Explorer v3.0 in 1996, and was developed by Microsoft Researcher David Kurlander together with the Virtual Worlds Gr...
Meridian 59 is an online computer role-playing game first published by the now defunct 3DO Company and now run by Near Death Studios. First launched online in an early form on December 15, 1995 and...
Launch of Alphaworld Public Beta, first 3D Internet-based virtual world allowing users to build while standing in their avatars, directly placing, copying and manipulating objects. Alphaworld is a ...
The Consortium held its official formation meeting and brainstorming session on June 30-July 2, 1995 in Soquel, California. The form of the organization and its goals were set down and founding mem...
Starbright World: Steven Spielberg Demo and Video Highlights (June 1995)
Worlds Inc: Worlds Chat, industrial demo of first Internet-based avatar world (May 1995, exact date of video unknown).
Starbright World: Starbright Pediatric Network (May 1995) with Steven Spielberg. Created by Worlds, Inc., Starbright Foundation, UB Networks, Intel etc.
Contact Consortium proposed at CONTACT XII Conference in late night discussions with Larry Niven, Reed Riner, Jim Funaro and Bruce Damer.
CyberTown (CT) (formally ColonyCity) is an online community with places (chat rooms) available either through a 2D or 3D chat environment. Users are able to have jobs within the community, thus gai...
Industrial video which is a demonstration of Alphaworld. Produced by Worlds, Incorporated in late 1995 (?)
Virtal Reality Markup/Modeling Language is a standardised file format for 3D vector graphics on the WWW. It has since been superseded by X3D. VRML is still used with some 3D CAD packages.
The Palace is a software program used to access graphical chat rooms called palaces in which users may interact with one another using graphical avatars overlaid on a graphical backdrop. The softwa...
In 1994, Dave Gobel spun Knowledge Adventure Worlds (renamed Worlds Inc. in 1995) out of Knowledge Adventure, a theme park development company. "KA" was to go on to produce the first Internet-based...
Released by New Line Cinema. aka Virtual Wars
The author coined the term "Metaverse" for a virtual-reality world that is the successor to the Internet.
The CAVE is a surround-screen, surround-sound, projection-based virtual reality (VR) system. The illusion of immersion is created by projecting 3D computer graphics into a 10'x10'x9' cube composed ...
The self proclaimed "fantasy documentary" begins with a shot of Adams asleep by the fire side with his television still on. In a dream, Adams, fed up by game shows, commercial and generally non-int...
In 1990, Virtual World Entertainment opened the first BattleTech emporium in Chicago. Modeled loosely on the U.S. military's SIMNET system of networked training simulators, BattleTech centres put p...
The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images...
A city-building simulation game, first released in 1989 and designed by Will Wright. SimCity spawned an entire series of Sim games. [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity]
Lucasfilm: Habitat Live Screen Capture - Part 2 - Club Caribe - Part 1 (by Kevin Elkin - Summer 1988 ??date)
Lucasfilm: Habitat Live Screen Capture - Part 1 (by Kevin Elkin - Summer 1988)
The actual term "Virtual Reality" is attributed to Jaron Lanier of VPL in 1986 in a conversation regarding the work of Scott Fisher. Fisher, of NASA Ames, had been referring to the field as "Virtua...
"Lucasfilm's Habitat -- it's a wonderful new place that's simply out of this world. Coming to life only on QuantumLink." Thus ends this remarkable demo of Habitat, Lucasfilm's graphical virtual wor...
"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."
By 1985, Scott Fisher left Atari to join NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, as founding director of the Virtual Environment Workstation (VIEW) project. The VIEW project put t...
A 3D wireframe Space Trading Game, published for the BBC Mirco by David Braben and Ian Bell. Elite had an open-ended gameplay, with a massive universe to explore
Neuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, notable for being the most famous early cyberpunk novel and winner of the science-fiction "triple crown"—the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, a...
Island of Kesmai was one of the first successful multi-user online role-playing games. It was written by Dr. John Taylor and Dr. Kelton Flinn out of the University of Virginia, who had written a fe...
Created by Atari games, I Robot was the first commercial video game with filled 3D Polygonal Graphics and Flat Shading. The game had two forms of gameplay - I, Robot, a shoot em'up and Doodle City...
During the 1980s, the increasing expense of traditional (live) exercises focused attention on the resource efficiency of computer-based simulations. The most important networked virtual environment...
The first widely recognized device for measuring hand positions was developed by Dr. Gary Grimes at Bell Labs. Patented in 1983, Grimes' Digital Data Entry Glove had finger flex sensors, tactile se...
William Gibson publishes his short story Burning Chrome in Omni magazine, in which he invents the word cyberspace. Sources: [Avatar Planet http://www.avatarplanet.com/history.php] [Wikipedia http:...
The VPL DataGlove was built by Thomas Zimmerman, who also patented the optical flex sensors used by the gloves. Like the Sayre glove, these sensors had fibre optic cables with a light at one end, a...
True Names was the science fiction novella which brought Vernor Vinge to prominence in 1981. It was one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would lat...
Rouge like games, made role playing games available to unix users. The unix distributions came bundled with hack(1) and was made available to a lot of Universities made a huge impact on how games, ...
Digibarn movies: Maze War Running on Two Xerox Altos for Legal Deposition, recorded in the 1990s but depicting the Alto version of Maze War from about 1980.
Digibarn movies: Maze War Running on Two Xerox Altos for Legal Deposition, recorded in the 1990s but depicting the Alto version of Maze War from about 1980.
Digibarn movies: Maze War Running on Two Xerox Altos for Legal Deposition, recorded in the 1990s but depicting the Alto version of Maze War from about 1980.
Digibarn movies: Maze War Running on Two Xerox Altos for Legal Deposition, recorded in the 1990s but depicting the Alto version of Maze War from about 1980.
Digibarn movies: Maze War Running on Two Xerox Altos for Legal Deposition, recorded in the 1990s but depicting the Alto version of Maze War from about 1980.
MUD development began in 1978 at Essex University, by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle. Also known as British Legends
Developed by Tom Defanti and Daniel Sandin in a 1977 project for the National Endowment for the Arts. The Sayre glove used light based sensors with flexible tubes with a light source at one end and...
The first computer adventure game. An interactive fiction originally designed by Will Crowther and later developed futher with Don Wood (1977).
A pioneering special effects company for the film industry, birthplace of PIXAR.
In the mid-1970s, Myron Krueger established an artificial reality laboratory called the Videoplace. His with the Videoplace was the creation of an artificial reality that surrounded the users, and ...
Digibarn: Original 1974 Maze War Version running on restored Imlac PDS-1 by Tom Uban (Nov 2004)
Digibarn: Original 1974 Maze War Version running on restored Imlac PDS-1 by Tom Uban (Nov 2004)
Digibarn: Original 1974 Maze War Version running on restored Imlac PDS-1 by Tom Uban (Nov 2004)
A holodeck is a simulated reality facility located on starships and starbases in the fictional Star Trek universe. The holodeck is depicted as an enclosed room in which objects and people are simu...
Maze War, the first first person shooter game, is created by Greg Thompson and a team at NASA Ames Research Center using two network connected Imlac PDS-2 vector graphic workstations.
Myron Krueger was the first artist to focus on interactive computer art as a composable medium. In the process, he invented many of the basic concepts of virtual reality. He pioneered the developme...
Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax create the first set of rules for Dungeons and Dragons
United States Defense Department creates ARPANET, which evolved into the internet. Source: [Avatar Planet http://www.avatarplanet.com/history.php]
Steve Jobs has described the Catalog as a conceptual forerunner of Web search engines; what's more relevant is the Catalogue as a collaborative effort of alternative thinking people outside of norm...
The Sword of Damocles is widely considered to be the first virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMD) system. It was created in 1968 by hall of fame computer scienti...
Project GROPE, started in 1967 at the University of North Carolina by Frederick Brooks, was particularly noteworthy for the advancements it made possible in the study of molecular biology. Brooks s...
This was the world's first operational computerized geographic information system (GIS), built by Roger Tomlinson at the Canadian Department of Energy, Mines and Resources. http://www.metaverseroa...
Ivan Sutherland, while conducting his initial research in immersive technologies, Sutherland wrote The Ultimate Display in 1965 in which he made the first advance toward marrying the computer to th...
The novel tells the story of a virtual city (total environment simulator) developed by a scientist and intended for marketing research purposes, thus ridding this virtual city of its burdensome "po...
Theodor Holm Nelson (born 1937) is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the term "hypertext" in 1963 and published it in 1965. He also is credited ...
1961 version of Spacewar! on restored PDP-1 computer at the Computer History Museum (recorded Sept 2006).
Comeau and Bryan, employees of Philco Corporation, constructed the first actual fabricated head-mounted display in 1961. Their system, called Headsight featured a single CRT element attached to the...
Heilig patented an for a device that some consider the first Head-Mounted Display (HMD). He first proposed the in 1960 and applied for a patent in 1962. It used wide field of view optics to view 3D...
In 1956, Morton Heilig began designing the first multisensory virtual experiences. Resembling one of today's arcade machines, the Sensorama combined projected film, audio, vibration, wind, and odor...
"The Veldt" is a short story by Ray Bradbury, originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, later included in short story compilation 'The Illustrated Man'. It revolves around a family in the...
The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. The memex has influenced the d...
Le Roy, a French mathematician and philosopher, worked with the Russian scientist V.I. Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin, both of whom attended Vernadsky's lectures on biogeochemistry at the Sorbon...
The story is told by the protagonist, "D-503", in his diary, which details both his work as a mathematician and his misadventures with a resistance group called the Mephi, who take their name from ...
The story describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth, and most of the human population lives below ground. Each individual lives in isola...
http://www.bitwise.net/~ken-bill/stereo.htm The stereoscope slides that were produced allowed people to sit in their own home and tour the world. The most popular slides (judging from the number t...
The panoramic painting, the first mass medium in history, was a truly immersive visual experience invented by Robert Baker and patented in 1787 as "La Nature a coup d'Oeil" a new painting technic t...
War when colonies fought for indenpendence from the british
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