Worlds Chat was the very first three-dimensional avatar world to become widely available on the Internet, starting in April 1995.[1] The virtual environment was depicted as a space station, through which wandered a range of avatars. Even without the tools for building or modifying by its users, it became an early precursor to online communities with its breakthrough technology.
Amongst the early users of Worlds Chat was Philip Rosedale, who went on to found Linden Labs and the popular virtual world Second Life. Two months after the launch of Worlds Chat platform, Alphaworld, the early prototype of what would become Active Worlds, was launched. Alphaworld extended the technology developed by the Worlds Chat team by allowing users to build in a 3D environment by simply picking up and placing pre-built objects, a concept later adopted by Second Life[2].
Prior to April 1995 the team had been doing corporate demos, but these were never broadly distributed. Worlds Chat was created to showcase Worlds' multi-user technology, a very new concept at the time. It also served as a test case for what Worlds' servers could handle in terms of simultaneous users. Worlds founder Dave Gobel was interested in the social computing aspects of the technology, and it was decided that a useful application of the technology would be to provide a 3D graphical parallel to such popular chat arenas as IRC.
After Worlds Chat's launch in April 1995, it went through several versions on the client side, with occasional upgrades to the server and client/server protocol. The user base went from hundreds to thousands, proving the technology robust enough to scale to accommodate thousands of simultaneous users.
Assembled by Dave Marvit (VP of Production), the original team that put together Worlds Chat consisted of Andrea Gallagher (producer), Dave Leahy (coder), Jeff Robinson (graphics), and Bo Adler (coder). The original client/server protocol for the multi-user environment was developed by Mitra, Bo Adler, Judy Challinger, and Dave Leahy (PTO US6219045). Contributors to the project included David Tolley (music), Helen Cho (graphics), Syed Asif Hassan (coding), Wolf Schmidt (documentation), John Navitsky and Scott Benson (operations), Naggi Asmar (quality assurance), and others.
Designer Jeff "Scamper" Robinson was World Chat's first artist, responsible for the look of its graphically rich sci-fi environment, the client interface, and the first round of avatars. Designer Helen Cho was soon brought on to help expand the 3D world to more fantastic environments, and to fill out the avatar gallery.
http://www.amazon.com/Avatars-Exploring-Building-Virtual-Internet/dp/0201688409/ref=sr_1_1?