Date: 05 Jul 1996
Project Background
The creation of a Virtual
University in Alpha World is a project currently
under development by the Contact Consortium. The
idea was first mentioned to me on Bruce Damer's
visit to London this month (June 96). As I
understand it the concept is to create a Virtual
Reality world dedicated to providing an academic
space for various VR/Internet related learning
and experiential activities. By using Alpha World
technology it is envisioned that a navigable
three-dimensional campus inhabited by avatars
will provide a useful and compelling environment
for the pursuit of these activities and serve as
an on-going study of academic learning in virtual
environments.
If possible an educational
'world' would be set up using Alpha World
software supplied by Worlds Inc. to be hosted on
a separate server. Control of this world would be
given to those responsible for maintaining TheU.
This control would extend to access rights,
design and creation of components, building
permissions and zoning etc..
Existing Virtual University
Projects
There are many current and
planned virtual or on-line universities.
Information on some of these are linked from the
Contact Consortium web site. Each project tackles
the problem in different ways, based on their own
particular requirements and available technology
at the time of inception.
Purpose and Role of TheU
Although founding an
academic institution specialising in studying the
use and efficacy of virtual worlds is an
important pursuit in itself, I feel that in order
to gain support from enough influential sources
to ensure its viability, it must offer much wider
appeal. The problem is that three-dimensional
virtual environments are not yet advanced enough
to conduct viable instruction in subjects
unrelated to the technology.
I suggest therefore, that it
should also be offered as a complementary
facility to all the existing virtual courses and
universities. After all, the members of these
communities are already well versed and
comfortable with the concepts of remote
communication. However, rather than providing an
alternative to their current teaching methods it
should offer merely an access hatch into a new,
communal environment. To understand the access
hatch metaphor, imagine students and teachers
currently engaged in an existing on-line course.
Even though they have access to each other across
many miles using text based communications they
probably feel quite isolated from their own
campus and colleagues. Being able to pop their
heads through an access hatch into a navigable
three-dimensional world would immediately enable
them to visualise their own campus and to
communicate in a more tangible way with their
fellow students and teachers. Furthermore it
would provide an ideal forum for them to meet and
exchange information with other on-line
universities. Eventually other universities which
currently do not have virtual courses would be
encouraged to have a presence. TheU then becomes
a campus of universities rather than just a
campus of students.
In time, when the technology
improves, it may be possible to conduct the
teaching process on the actual campus itself
rather than using the campus merely as an access
hatch into an albeit, compelling social
environment.
Virtual Campus Design
It is clear that TheU is a
very different beast to Alpha World itself. Alpha
World is essentially an anarchic environment
where freedom of expression is the main
ingredient. Whereas TheU, by definition a task
oriented environment, requires a more rigid
structure and overall management. I suggest
therefore that building of the actual campus be
tightly controlled and under the co-ordination of
a committee of avatars who act as a town planning
committee and who carry out the actual building
process or can appoint a building team to do so.
It is essential however to
ensure that there are other areas outside the
campus that can be used by students to build
their own virtual environments completely free
from any controls otherwise one of the essential
ingredients of Alpha World's success would be
missing.
Architectural Competition
It is my opinion (but maybe
I am biased!) that the best people to actually
visualise and understand the use of architectural
space are architects themselves. Furthermore,
students of architecture who have been untainted
by the practicalities of the real world, would be
even more capable of applying themselves to the
ethereal and imaginative approach required for
building effective virtual spaces. In fact most
of the schemes they work on during their time at
university are often exercises in unreality!
An ideal vehicle for this
approach would be to commission an international
competition for students of architecture. I
envisage that this would be offered to students
individually via their universities and may be
included in their curricula as a voluntary
project to replace one of their set projects. A
first prize (and possibly runner-up) would be an
expenses paid trip to a conference on TheU, held
presumably in California, where the winning
student or team of students would be asked to
present their scheme.
Clearly there are problems
with this approach. Each school would require
good Internet access. This is a reason for
offering the competition to universities on a
voluntary basis where only a small number of
students would require Internet access from each
university. Any university that wanted to make
the competition the subject of one of their
projects for a complete class would of course be
welcome to do so but may have logistic problems
with Internet access. Alternatively, if the Alpha
World software can run on a LAN and if Worlds
Inc. would be willing to donate some copies, it
may be possible to facilitate designing and
building of these schemes off-world. Either way,
the schools would probably require their students
to work using traditional drawing techniques in
parallel in order to be able to critique their
work.
An essential pre-requisite
for this idea is the involvement of sponsors or
preferably one large commercial sponsor. I feel
that the possibility of this is quite high
especially if the media are involved at an early
stage and the idea can be 'sold' to them, as any
large sponsor will be far easier to convince if
the project gets good media coverage. I am
convinced that the idea is novel enough to be
extremely interesting to mainstream media
including the television networks (especially in
the UK).
Summary
I believe that TheU should
be offered to existing virtual universities as a
social and demonstration environment as well as a
place for actual teaching on VR issues. A
competition brief for students of architecture
should be developed and offered internationally
to universities with architectural schools. A
concerted effort should be made to find
commercial backing/sponsorship for the project
and to forge links with the media.
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