Since Virtual Harlem has been around since virtual reality’s naissance—when, as the film critic Roger Ebert put it at the time, virtual reality was “still more theory than practice”—Carter’s project has been through nearly every version of the technology as it has evolved. First, it was built exclusively for what’s known as a CAVE environment; basically a small room with projector screens for walls. Then, in 2005, Virtual Harlem migrated to the online virtual space Second Life, where it continued to expand until 2009 with the help of grants from the National Black Programming Consortium in Harlem and the government of Norway.

Carter was not only able to add a number of additional buildings and non-player characters (like extras in a movie) to his virtual city but, with the help of other users and programmers, he enhanced textures, incorporated scripted interactions with certain non-player characters, and even built a working trolley and teleportation system for ease of transport between sites. He organized regular concerts at venues in the virtual space, held class lectures in his digital lecture hall (currently the makeshift interior of the Savoy Ballroom), and invited his students to use the space for class projects by curating art shows, role-playing as famous figures, or holding poetry readings. “Once you have the virtual world in place,” Carter says, “all kinds of things are possible.”

When Second Life eventually fell out of vogue and dropped out of competition technologically speaking, Carter moved Virtual Harlem over to an open-source platform called OpenSim, where it stalled for just over two years until the Vancouver-based Virtual World Web, a division of traditionally adult-oriented Utherverse, announced its intentions to develop a 3D web browser. Curio, the company said, would be compatible with the upcoming consumer version of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and could also function as a regular web browser on traditional 2D screens. Carter, now with the University of Arizona’s Africana Studies Department, is working with Kelland Thomas of Arizona’s Schools of Music and Information and a pair of student programmers to move the project over to that browser. (Some of the music filtering out of the yet-unopened clubs in Virtual Harlem will be recorded by Thomas’ jazz band.)

The team intends to import the existing Virtual Harlem to the new platform by the end of the summer, but with upgrades. They’re working on improving the quality of graphics and textures and—using data that is now readily-available from Google Maps—dropping everything into their correct geographic locations for the first time ever. Come the start of the fall semester, anyone in the world with access to any device with web browsing capabilities should be able login to Virtual Harlem and cruise its streets—maybe even catch a (virtual) performance at the (digital) Cotton Club. Both project collaborators, though, say that it would require something of a windfall with respect to funding—they have their eye on one of the three-dozen-or-so six-figure awards made available each year by the National Endowment for the Humanities, many of which are earmarked for digital research—to bring the project to its full potential.