TheU Historical Imagery and Background
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Long before
Virtual University Architecture Competition
was the the original TheU Virtual University
project, conceived by Bruce Damer in 1995 as
a Contact Consortium project to build a 3D
multi-user virtual university campus in
Cyberspace to teach a combination of skills
about building and living in virtual worlds
and their communities, and learning about how
to engage in complex collaboration crossing
cultural and national boundaries.
Stuart Gold's
comprehensive history of TheU is also a great
personal memoir of the background to the
competition and one architect's pioneering
journey into the new realms of Cyberspace.
In late May of
1996 at a workshop in Florence Italy
sponsored by Derrick deKherkove of the
MCluhan Program of the University of Toronto,
a student team brainstormed and designed the
first rendition of TheU in the New
Towne section of the Contact Consortium's
Sherwood Forest Town virtual village at 105N
187E in AlphaWorld, the first
community of the brand new Active Worlds
platform.
The Fortezzo Di Basso in Florence, birthplace
of TheU
Stuart Gold, as his
avatar San Marco participated in-world in the
original U demonstrations in the Fortezza di
Basso on a large screen in front of hundreds
of media designers, students and press.
Hanging in his life sized avatar on the
screen, San Marco said Ciao Italia and had
little idea what was in store for him! The
students who had built the original U came
from the American University at Sophia
Antipolis in southern France. They later
contributed a white paper on Proposals for
the Virtual University. Mark Pesce, who was
also teaching at the workshop, wrote an
article about TheU.
Bruce flew to
London, England after leaving Florence to
meet Stuart F2F (face to face) and
bring him the good news of TheU. On a
roundabout backwards motorway journey, Stuart
saw the vision of what TheU could be and said
let there be a competition! Stuart, I
hope I haven't got it wrong! Just in case he
has written his own comprehensive comical
cosmic history of TheU. Bruce managed to get
a contract signed with Worlds Incorporated
for a very own world for the Contact
Consortium and TheU was given birth in early
July 1996 (by the Creator himself, Protagonist)
as one of the very first worlds separate from
AlphaWorld. Stuart then set out to construct
the basis for the competition, starting with
TheU ground zero plaza and beautiful
University Development Centre (seen above).
The UDC, as it became
affectionately known, served a a wonderful
demonstration of how to build and equip a
virtual structure with useful features,
including different galleries joined together
by bump teleporters, websites ported into the
world and represented as images on the walls
and uncrowded building yielding a good user
experience (a good frame rate). We held
competition team meetings at the UDC and I
even taught some of my San Francisco State
University classes there.
For
enquiries on TheU Project contact 
