1994

Ron Britvich created WebWorld for the Peregrine Systems. It was the first virtual 2.5D world where 10,000's of individuals could chat, travel and build in, and visually link to other parts of the WWW. Chris Cole, the founder of Peregrine Systems, Dave Gobel from Knowledge Adventure (makers of 3D Dinosaur Adventure etc), and Cole Larson from Kinetic Effects Inc, a Simon Fraser University spin-off company that marketed the Life Forms avatar software developed by Kinetic Effects Research Inc (now Credo Interactive), founded Knowledge Adventure Worlds ( KAW ), merging the Life Forms technology with Knowledge Adventure's 3D-environment technology.

1995 HISTORY OF WORLDS

Ron Britvich joined KAW. He worked on the AlphaWorld (renamed Active Worlds) project inside KAW, along with the "official" product Worlds Chat. KAW was renamed as Worlds Inc. Lynne Ann and Danny Viescas joined Worlds Inc. as avatar and object makers, David Leahy was the Integrator and Producer for Worlds 1994 -1997. He developed Cyber Oz City (the first 3D commmercial space). David Tolley, the composer and sound effect maker (based in San Francisco, California) worked for Worlds .Inc from 1995 -1997. He was a staff composer for this multi-media firm, writing music for their 3D virtual reality programs "Worlds Chat," "AlphaWorld," and "Nishho-Toppan". He also composed for Starbright (the company's joint venture with Steven Spielberg).

Wolf Schmidt, a member of the team, offered the following history......." Worlds Chat was meant as a demonstration of our multi-user technology, and as an active laboratory of what our servers could do. We had done corporate demos before April 1995, but they had never been widely distributed enough to get hundreds of people logged into the server at once. Dave Gobel (Worlds founder) was interested in the social computing aspects of the technology, and it was jointly decided that a good application of the technology would be to provide a 3D graphical parallel to the IRC and other chat popular on the Internet as of January 1995. The first Worlds Chat came out in April 1995, and went through several versions on the client side, and meanwhile we occasionally changed the server and protocol in the background. The user base went from hundreds to thousands-plus, though our record for simultaneous users is still just under 1,000 real users at once. As a sort of plug here, no other multi-user servers to our knowledge can scale that well or carry that much load. Tests with bots (automated avatars) have run even more users at once."

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