Worlds Chat

A Worlds Chat user is allowed to choose from a gallery of existing three-dimensional avatars to be their representation in the virtual world. The gallery is presented in a fashion similar to that of a first person shooter, except without the hands and weapon in the view port. Once an avatar was chosen, the user was placed in the central hub of a virtual space station. The user would see representations of other online users in the station. Users could exit a platform through sliding doors, travel through halls, and find other platforms with groups of people to interact with. The screen was split into several areas including one for messages from the software program itself, a window with a 3D interface similar to Doom (video game), a window for chat messages, and a space station map indicating which platform the user currently inhabited. Both a keyboard and mouse were integral parts of the user interface.

Assembled by Dave Marvit (VP of Production), the original team that constructed Worlds Chat consisted of Andrea Gallagher (producer), Dave Leahy, Syed Asif Hassan, and Bo Adler (development), and Jeff "Scamper" Robinson and Helen Cho (UI and graphics). The original client/server protocol for the multi-user environment was developed by Mitra Ardron, Bo Adler, Judy Challinger, and Dave Leahy (PTO US6219045).[5] Unlike other immersive environments of its day, it worked on lines as slow as 9600 baud. Contributors to the project included David Tolley (music), Wolf Schmidt (documentation), John Navitsky and Scott Benson (operations), Naggi Asmar (quality assurance), and others.

The first release of VRML, a standard for defining virtual worlds, was less than six months old when Worlds Chat was released. This meant that Worlds Inc. needed to discover and define its own best practices while creating Worlds Chat. The additional speed of dial-up Internet connections naturally placed limitations on the amount of information that could be transmitted to and from the Worlds Inc. servers. An increasing number of users alongside the expanding virtual world increased these pressures.

In 2011 Tamiko Thiel, a creative director and producer and Worlds Inc. from 1994 to 1996, wrote an article entitled "Cyber-Animism and Augmented Dreams" describing the history of virtual worlds, in which she wrote: "In the virtual worlds and avatar communities in the mid 1990s we thought we all would start parallel, virtual, online existences in which we could create ourselves anew and realize our personal dreamworlds. The technology however was too awkward, the processors and the Internet connections too slow, and the user base for our worlds never extended beyond a small dedicated community. By 2002 the virtual communities of the first generation all went bankrupt or looked for other ways to earn money."[6]

• Virtual world
• Metaverse
• Cyberspace
• Active Worlds
• VRML

• Worlds Promo