Building Virtual Worlds, 2008
A course in the Masters of Digital Media Program
Centre for Digital Media
Great Northern Way Campus, Vancouver, BC
Three Student Projects
For the 2008 Fall semester, 29 talented graduate students
worked on three intensive projects, designed to immerse them
in a variety of technical and conceptual aspects of Virtual
World Craft. For each project, student teams designed web
sites to explain the process and show their work. In the
links below you can see their work.
Machinima Time!
The students were asked to produce Machinima videos
developed entirely using Second Life. The assignment
was to make a high-quality narrative. Throughout the
process, they got a crash course in building content
in Second Life, including scripting, camera motions,
and avatar control. Some of the videos dealt with
social and metaphysical issues of virtual worlds.
Great Northern World
The class was divided into four teams, and each team
was given a simple 3D virtual world engine created in
Java by the instructor, Jeffrey Ventrella, with the help
of Teaching Assistant Ken Pratt, who re-implemented the
world using the JavaMonkey Engine. Starting from this
"stem cell" codebase, the students came up with four
very different - and very brilliant - virtual worlds.
Exploratory Final Project
For the final project, the teams were given three options:
(1) a networked version of the previous project featuring
nonverbal avatar expression, (2) a virtual goods prototype
and business plan, using at least two commercial virtual
worlds, and (3) an immersive interface to a knowledge
database, such as the OpenLibrary or Wikipedia.
