Virtual Communities

• a killer application of the present day
• evolved from video games, chat rooms, MUDs
• collaborative virtual reality on standard hardware
• I first became interested due to EverQuest^(tm)
• ~2000 Net users in an entire virtual world in glorious 3D
• Cities, wilderness, dungeons, moons; thousands of objects
• Travel, fight, cook, "train", cast spells, and CHAT
• Runs acceptably even on modems

What are Virtual Communities Good For?

• For me, EverQuest solves a "distance" problem
• I can play with family in Seattle and Portland
• What "serious" domains have a distance problem?
  "distance" to overcome...or to maintain!
  • Education
  • Software Engineering
  • Match.com
  • ...?
• Entrepreneurial opportunity: identify domains and apply this killer application to the many areas that will benefit from it.
• Research opportunity: reduce the cost of building new VC's

NMSU's Virtual Computer Science Department

• What works so well for gaming just has to be useful for distance learning
• Can solve my "midnight office hour" problem, not just the student-in-Carlsbad problem
• Testing this hypothesis with an $840,000 NSF education grant
• We will build, literally, a 3D model of our department
• Including collaborative editors, compilers, debuggers...
• Far fewer objects and simpler graphics than EQ
• Real time audio; "cartoon videophone"
• Consortium of NMSU, NNMCC, CIT, NMSU-Grants, NMSU-Carlsbad

What We've Done in Our First Year-and-a-Half