Dipity
Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) today announced that its highly anticipated PlayStation®Home Beta service for PLAYSTATION® 3 (PS3™) will become available for all PS3 users around the world o...
Lively no more 11/19/2008 05:55:00 PM In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google h...
Disney Online, part of the Disney Interactive Media Group, invites guests to depart the mainland and set off on unforgettable journeys in the meadows of Pixie Hollow. Today marks the official openi...
"LucasArts and BioWare™, a division of Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), today announced the development of Star Wars®: The Old Republic™, a story-driven massively multiplayer online PC game set...
The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time is a partnership between IBM and the Palace Museum in Beijing, China. For more than five hundred years, the Ming and Qing emperors ruled China from the pal...
What is ExitReality for? * View any webpage in 3D... every website is now a virtual world * Turn your standard 2D web page into your own unique 3D space * Meet and chat with people in ...
Hangout launched today their room-based, web-embedded and cross-platform 3D online virtual world in closed beta. "On Hangout, teens interact with their friends as they do in the offline world- whet...
Journeys is a social world themed by real world trips. We mashed Yahoo! Maps, Pictures from Flickr and more to create a casual virtual world that bridge to the real one we know and love. [via http...
Become part of Star Trek®: The Star Trek universe will appear for the first time in a massively multiplayer online game. Everything from the elegant domes of Starfleet Academy to the ancient temple...
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 ...
This MMO takes the full-fledged, millions-strong community of Gaia Online and brings their fictional home to life in the form of a huge virtual world to be explored and enjoyed. Players create Gai...
The MTV House is a virtual world where you can create your own avatar, explore rooms packed with interactive content and objects, meet friends and chat about music.
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 ...
Meez Launches Virtual World - Meez Nation Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS198971+18-Jun-2008+PRN20080618
a 'alpha test' outdoor environment build of Berlin City. A full scale replica of Berlin City Center, clicking on doors connects you to the Twinity Apartments.
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures is a massively-multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) based on the world and works of acclaimed author Robert E. Howard. In Age of Conan, players enter Hybo...
SocioTown is a browser-based 3D social virtual world developed by Outside The Box Software (http://www.outsidetheboxsoftware.com).
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...
Twinity is a 3D online world that mashes up the real with the virtual world. * Create the virtual you * Build a digital home anywhere in the world * Meet real people & hook up with fri...
Virtual World using the Opensim software. Central Grid was the 1st commercial Opensim grid. Central Grid's mission is to provide a 3D virtual world where residents can interact and create their...
Just Leap In: "A 3D World of Your Own" Create a 3D world. Share your Photos & Videos. Add a soundtrack. Connect with friends. Share on the Web. An evolving 3D social applet with web integration. ...
inDuality, a universal client for viewing virtual worlds in a Web browser. An alpha version of inDuality was first publicly demonstrated in October 2007 at the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose...
Metaplace is a software platform that democratizes the development of virtual worlds. The platform is developed by Areae, the company established by Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies designer Ra...
Novoking is designed and operated by Novoking (Beijing) technology Limited Co. in Beijing China. Novoking was conceived by its founder & CEO Mr. Patrick Zha in Oct, 2005. According to Patrick's in...
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...
WAR is an MMORPG based on Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy setting. Source: [Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_Online]
Home™ is a real-time 3D, networked community that serves as a meeting place for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) users from around the world, where they can interact, communicate, join online games, shop, shar...
The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ is the world's first and only MMOG based on the Books of J.R.R. Tolkien. Players can experience the most famous fantasy world of all time, explorin...
BarbieGirls.com came out on April 24, 2007 and was created by the advertising agency Studiocom for the toy company Mattel. It is a controlled community, designed to provide a safe environment for g...
Weblin is an avatar service that lets you chat with others as you surf the web. Through Weblin’s downloadable application, you can create an avatar, give it a name, and begin surfing the web. When ...
“Myst Online: Uru Live” storyline continues to showcase new content for fans of the Myst franchise. On the game's official launch date, another never-before-seen world will debut. This new garden A...
Michael Wright announces and releases the first alpha code of a Second-Life compatible simulator based on work done by the libsecondlife group. Evolves into a general platform for Virtual Worlds ho...
HiPiHi is an online 3D virtual world game founded by Xu Hui and Rao Xuewei in Beijing in the People's Republic of China. It is the first Chinese virtual world game that allows virtual netizens to f...
Blink 3D, a virtual worlds development platform developed by Pelican Crossing, Inc. Blink 3D went into open Beta in March 2005 and was launched in December 2006. Version 2.0 was released on June 27...
Play Money explores the remarkable new phenomenon of MMORPGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual env...
The first avatars walk through the open source urban platform for creative work.
Development on an open source implementation of the Second Life networking protocol begins.
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...
Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach (PC) The defining pen-and-paper RPG becomes the ultimate massively-multiplayer online game as Turbine Entertainment and Atari bring the basement sensation i...
Red Light Center (RLC) is a privately owned Massively Multi-User Reality (sm) site that was made available to the public early in 2006 by Utherverse Inc. Its tag line is "Live Your Fantasy". Red L...
The Virtual World of Kaneva is an Internet-based virtual world first released in beta form in mid 2006. It is developed by Atlanta-based startup Kaneva, using the Kaneva Game Platform. [Source: ht...
Virtual MTV, more commonly known as vMTV, is a collection of virtual worlds under the MTV Networks umbrella. vMTV includes seven separate virtual worlds, each based on an MTV television show. [S...
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...
Webkinz are stuffed animals that were originally released by the Ganz company on April 29, 2005. The toys are similar to many other small plush toys, however they come with a special code on their ...
Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings and even explore galaxies in the Sky. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured ...
Club Penguin is an online game developed by New Horizon Interactive. Using cartoon penguins as avatars, players waddle around, chat, play minigames, and participate in other activities with one ano...
Microsoft Virtual Earth is a geospatial mapping platform produced by Microsoft. It allows developers to create applications that layer location-relevant data on top of the Virtual Earth map imagery...
WoW is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). The virtual world consists of two planets, Azeroth and Draenor (also known as "Outland"). Azeroth consists of two main continents,...
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...
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 ...
Multiverse provides technology known as MMOG middleware (Multiverse uses the term platform). It includes the client software Multiverse World Browser (for Microsoft Windows only at this point), a s...
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...
Toontown Online (commonly known as Toontown) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game created by The Walt Disney Company and billed as the first such game intended for kids and families....
Eve Online is a player-driven persistent-world massively multiplayer online game set in a science fiction space setting. Players pilot a wide array of customizable ships through a universe comprisi...
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...
The brainchild of Will Wright of Maxis, which was bought by Electronic Arts.
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...
GaiaOnline is an anime-themed social networking and forums-based website. Originally named "Go-Gaia.com ??-02", it changed to gaiaonline.com on February 18, 2003 by Gaia Interactive. Gaia originall...
Game Neverending (GNE) was an innovative massively multiplayer online game that was in development by Ludicorp, better known as the creators of Flickr, from 2002 until it was cancelled in 2004. Ga...
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...
What is Shadowbane? A simple question, but not so simple to answer. Shadowbane is many things to many people. The game is officially as a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying game (MMORPG or MM...
Created by Will Wright, The Sims is a strategic life-simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims]
a shortlived Online Theme park and communication environment.
Habbo, formerly Habbo Hotel, is a social networking website owned and operated by Sulake Corporation. Aimed at teenagers, Habbo features chat rooms rendered by isometric projection in the form of v...
Neopets (originally NeoPets) is a virtual pet website launched by Adam Powell and Donna Williams on 15 November 1999. Six months after the web site was launched, Adam Powell and Donna Williams succ...
In the world of Asheron's Call®, the legendary mage Asheron has summoned many to the mythical land of Dereth in an attempt to stop the forces of evil from overrunning his people and their world. On...
EverQuest, often called EQ, is a 3D fantasy-themed massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that was released on March 16, 1999. The original design is credited to Brad McQuaid, Stev...
Whyville is an educational Internet site geared towards preteens and children. Its goal is to engage its users in learning about a broad range of topics, from science and business to art and geogra...
Psychological thriller/science fiction film directed by David Cronenberg. eXistenZ is a fictional virtual reality game that is fully immersive; to play, players must plug a 'pod', a bio-organic ga...
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...
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction action film written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski and starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, and Hugo Weaving. ...
Avatars! Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet, by Bruce Damer (Peachpit Press) was released at the Avatars97 conference in San Francisco on Oct 22-24, 1997.
Ultima Online (UO) is a popular graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), released on September 25, 1997, by Origin Systems. It was instrumental to the development of the g...
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 ...
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...
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 the Active Worlds virtual wo...
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...
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.
In 1994, Dave Gobel spun Knowledge Adventure Worlds (renamed Worlds Inc. in 1995) out of Knowledge Adventure to create fully navigable 3D virtual worlds for global users of the internet. In 1994 KA...
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...
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...
VPL declared June 7, 1989, “Virtual Reality Day.” On that day, both VPL and Autodesk publicly demonstrated the first commercial VR systems. The Autodesk VR CAD (computer-aided design) system was ba...
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]
By the mid-1990s, Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC had begun to articulate a research program that instead sought to introduce computers into the human world. In an article titled "The Computer for the 21...
One of the very first immersive 3D video game on 8bits computers that uses the FreeScape engine. Dark Side and Total Eclipse were famous sequel of Driller which also use FreeScape.
Initially created in 1985 by Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar, and was arguably the first attempts at a large-scale commercial virtual community that was graphically based. It is considered a fore...
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...
The fourth in the series of Ultima computer role-playing games. To become the "Avatar" was the goal of Ultima IV. The later games assumed that you were the Avatar and "Avatar" was the player's visu...
"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...
Tim Berners-Lee develops Enquire, a hypertext system that was an early precursor of HTML and the Web. While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a pro...
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, ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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