Open Virtual Worlds at the University of St Andrews

I thought it was time to start posting something here other than the occasional photo (not that I even do that very often…) so I’m going to start posting about the exciting things I’m doing for my PhD. There is a new category ‘Academic’ for these posts, so you can easily follow/ignore them.


I am part of the Open Virtual Worlds group at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. We have an official blog, we own the openvirtualworlds.org domain & we even have a Facebook page because that’s the done thing these days. Stolen from the blog…

Open Virtual Worlds are multi-user 3D environments within which users are represented by the proxy of an avatar. They are similar to multi-player computer games but differ in the important respect that their appearance, interactive characteristics, content and purpose are all programmable. In addition they can act as a portal for organising multiple media, including web pages, video streams, textual documents and simulations.

Unlike computer games they have no pre-set goals; users or groups of users are free to make up their own goals. They offer the potential of providing the core of the future 3D Internet. Our research addresses issues that need to be addressed for this potential to be realised.

My interest lies in the concept of simultaneous presence in real & virtual environments via the cross reality paradigm & investigating solutions to the vacancy problem – the inability with current technologies to simultaneously immerse oneself in both the real world & a complete virtual world.

This is different to the concept of augmented reality, which many people are now familiar with thanks to the popularity of augmented reality smartphone apps, as cross reality deals with the combination of a complete virtual world with the real world, rather than the sparse digital augmentations upon the real world that augmented reality performs.

I am investigating this concept via a case study that builds upon existing work within the Open Virtual Worlds group, by developing a system that allows visitors to the ruined cathedral at St Andrews to simultaneously explore our virtual world reconstruction of the cathedral in a natural & intuitive manner via a tablet computer, in a project dubbed the Virtual Time Window (VTW).

Stay tuned for some more frighteningly exciting updates on what I’m working on, along with details of how you can log into our reconstructions & explore them yourselves!