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example student created world An Artist’s Perspective on Building Virtual Worlds I first heard about Building Virtual Worlds through rumor, as the words “Virtual Reality” buzzed through the hallways and classrooms of Carnegie Mellon. My first true experience with virtual reality occurred during an open house in the spring of 1998. I became Virtual Spiderman, a character from a world made in Building Virtual Worlds as a final project by five undergraduate students in two and a half weeks. It was an absolutely incredible sensation to watch as a virtual world responded to my actions. I was able to suspend disbelief until spinning webs and crawling up buildings came naturally. When the opportunity arose I showed my portfolio and enrolled in Building Virtual Worlds as a “Painter,” one of the four different roles in the class. Students could sign up as a Modeler, a Painter, a Scripter, or an “Intangible” (a student who creates sound, music, and storyboards, and contributes to the overall design of a virtual world). Coming to CMU as a Fine Art major made me a perfect candidate to become a Painter in the class. The first day of class was an interesting one. It was the first time I had taken a course filled with people from many different departments. I noticed that there was an enormous stress placed on teamwork, cooperation, and responsibility. Randy Pausch, the professor teaching the course, began his first lecture with a remark that I still remember: he told us that Building Virtual Worlds could be a class about Shuffleboard, if only people were as interested in shuffleboard as they were in virtual reality. He stressed the importance of teamwork, asserting that it was only the excitement of this medium that brought us together. Professor Pausch told us that as a collaborative whole, we could create much more than any of us could create individually. We then received our first homework assignment. We were to learn the tools and show our creativity and proficiency. Either I had underestimated the intensity of the class or I had no idea what I was getting into, but after spending twenty-five hours on the the first four days of the project, I knew that Building Virtual Worlds meant business. The next day of class we showed our work, and were then placed into a team for our first group project. Our group would be spending roughly forty hours together over the next two weeks. Our first task as a group was to shake hands and learn each other’s names. Since we were all forced into cooperating and working together from start to finish, it was important to get off on the right foot. We went through a very intensive process of brainstorming until we finally decided what to make of our first assignment. Since the goal of the class was participation and process we would always show our work when it was halfway to completion for critiques and suggestions from the rest of the class. An added bonus to Building Virtual Worlds was having visitors from the “real world” come to lecture us about relevant work in the field of entertainment technology and virtual reality. The visitors’ topics ranged everywhere from amusement park design to building sets for science fiction shows to understanding classical theatre. Having guest lectures and open forums in the class helped the large group of fifty students share ideas and information. I found the process of building, evaluating, then building again to be quite a worthwhile and rewarding one. I noticed how all of the students in the class felt a sense of pride in the manner in which they could contribute to this new and exciting medium. Working with creative and diverse people helped me realize the importance of teamwork, and I learned a tremendous amount about responsibility to my group and to myself. Because of the intensity of the working conditions, hard times were bound to arise, but the point was to stick it out and make things work. Professor Pausch had suggested at the beginning of the semester that one of the goals of the course was “not to have a fistfight”, and we soon came to realize that he wasn’t joking: as deadlines approached, tempers could flare, and it important to learn to maintain a sense of mutual courtesy group diplomacy in order to prevent nasty arguments. Once our worlds were finished we showed them off to the class and to other curious individuals who visited the class to see what it was all about. We then immediately moved on to a completely different group of strangers and started the process all over again. (This was to occur a total of five times throughout the semester.) The most amazing aspect of the process was creating something at a level of quality and depth that I could not have begun to approach had I been working alone. As long as we were able to collaborate successfully as a team, the only constraint on what we were capable of creating was our imagination and the time in took to implement our ideas. Both teamwork and virtual reality took on a great importance in my life. I was incredibly impressed by the perseverance and pride that the students in the class attributed to their work. I spent countless hours in the computer clusters with these students, even on Friday and Saturday nights. I was so heavily influenced by Building Virtual Worlds that I wanted my career to take a turn in the same direction. I now work as a functioning member of Randy Pausch’s virtual reality research group, Stage 3, where we collaboratively design and implement fun and innovative techniques for interaction in immersive environments. We constantly strive to make virtual reality available to everyone, including young children. Alice, an authoring tool designed to create virtual worlds, was developed by the members of our group, and is distributed freely over the web (http://www.alice.org/). Stage 3 offers an atmosphere of humor and relaxed friendliness coupled with dedication and productivity that I will always cherish. David Stern-Gottfried, 3rd Year Art Major
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