"It is a world that has existed throughout time, but only now do we have the bridge to reach it."
- L. Parker Moore, Art Director, Starbright World
This document describes the conceptual vision behind Starbright World, a world-wide, multi-user, interactive, networked virtual reality playspace. Its purpose is to give seriously ill children a virtual community where they can meet and play with other children regardless of their physical condition or location. It will be a place to explore the healing properties of community, communication, and participation.
Seriously ill children face lives marked by social and psychological deprivations that compound the physical trauma of their conditions. There are properties intrinsic to a networked virtual reality playspace that directly address many of these problems:
The children suffer physical isolation from friends and family when illness forces them into the hospital, compounded by social isolation if they lack a peer group that understands what it is like to fight a life-threatening affliction.
Starbright World is a meeting place for children who share such experiences. The Starbright Pediatric Network will allow them to enter this world from the hospital or home, and meet with the same friends in the same playspace regardless of their physical location. Starbright World will join these children and their families into a world-wide virtual community that transcends the physical boundaries of beds, bedrooms and hospitals.
The children suffer from a loss of self-image when illness affects their appearance and physical and mental capabilities at a time of life when they are defining themselves as individuals.
In Starbright World, they will be able to choose and even create the characters that represent them in the virtual playspace. This provides a rich possibility for role-playing and wish-fulfillment, which are vital parts of the building of identity and the therapeutic function of play.
The children suffer from disempowerment when doctors, nurses and hospital staff are added onto the hierarchy of parents and teachers who have more control over their lives than do the children themselves.
In Starbright World the children will become the primary builders of both the visual environment and the culture that develops within it. It will be an empowering place where children can discuss issues that are of importance to them and act on their ideas within the virtual world.
The children suffer from a loss of childhood when the time they would usually spend in play is spent wrestling with issues of sickness and death that other people only have to confront as adults.
In Starbright World, whether confined to a bed, house or hospital, the child can enter into a fantasy realm where their physical condition is irrelevant to their play.
Starbright World is a place and a community, just as a playground in your neighborhood is a place which evolves a community out of the children who go there regularly. It is a special type of virtual reality, called a "MUD", that in its text-based form has a rich tradition on the Internet. MUD stands for "multi-user dungeon", as these were initially networked versions of "Dungeons and Dragons". This is a game in which, under the stern control of all powerful "dungeon masters", players take on the roles of fantasy characters and fight against dragons, monsters and other players. Recently, however, people have used this technology to create more socially oriented MUDs in which there are no explicit rules or goals. The primary purpose is to "hang out" and socialize, like grownups do in cafes and kids do in playgrounds. (See references at end of paper.)
This is the type of MUD we are creating in Starbright World. Instead of strict rules and hierarchies, these social MUDs have very egalitarian structures. All participants have the power to create their own characters and to build onto the world itself, and this in fact becomes a major focus of social activity. The originators of the MUD, rather than using their special powers to dominate other players, function as facilitators who help these players implement their own ideas. These can be ideas for activities that use the existing space, ideas for building new spaces or ideas for social structures and events.
Building environments, making things, putting on costumes, role-playing, constructing social situations and acting them out - these are primary activities of play that a child uses to experiment with ideas of identity, society and how the world works. If it is true that "social activity is an ongoing process of world-making", then a virtual world where children can actually implement and test their ideas provides an empowering forum for experimentation and development of their social abilities.
Starbright World will be a highly interactive environment that can be used by many children simultaneously. They will enter via Starbright Worldstations connected to the Starbright Pediatric Network. (The specifications of the Network and Worldstations are discussed in the technical specification document.)
For Starbright World to grow into a real community it must be a place that children can go to regularly and often. Each child, whether in the hospital or eventually at home, should be able to access a Worldstation regularly. If it remains a special treat to be used a couple times a year when the child has to go to the hospital there will be no benefit of continuity, no community will form and the children will have no chance to develop mastery and the feeling that they can make a contribution to the World.
The children will see a visually rich environment depicted on the screen of their Worldstations. Each child is represented in that space by his or her own "avatar", animated digital actors whose appearance can run the gamut from realistic figures to cartoon characters or even abstract drawings and can be selected or created by the children themselves. Through their avatars they will be able to see each other on the screen, hear each other talk via speakers or headphones on their Worldstations, move through Starbright World at will and participate in games and activities, either alone or in groups. The children will also be able to see each other live via video cameras on their Worldstations, and thereby participate via "telepresence" in group activities and outings all over the world.
The question is always asked, "What will they be able to do there?" The general answer is, "Everything that children do when they play;" the more explicit answer is, "They will be able to build the world itself". It will be a playspace where children can do theater, play house, dress up, build castles and draw monsters. The difference is the castles and monsters they make will be just as functional as everything else in the world - they can be the creators of their own amusement park. Simple things and private spaces can be built by the children alone; complicated or public things might be built in groups with the help of Starbright volunteers, on-line camp counselors and guest artists.
The infrastructure for Starbright World, to be completed by the end of 1995, will include a number of different regions, basic communication services and tools that allow the children to build their own avatars and add onto the world themselves. New areas will be added over time, for instance regions for specific age groups and for special activities and games, including educational and therapeutic uses of the interactive technology.
By June we will finish building an initial space for a small number of children, and the technological capability for them to see each other and interact with each other over the Starbright Network. Instead of the simplified forms and primary colors of existing virtual reality products we want to create a richer, more painterly environment, more akin to the esthetic of a children's book or animated film. To further provoke the imagination we want the space to seem infinitely extensible, as if other lands are waiting to be discovered beyond the horizon. We will therefore produce a 3-level design: sky world, tropical world and cave world. Initially each world will have a different atmosphere, feeling of space, graphic and visual quality to it, but there is nothing sacred about this division - each world will grow and change!
sky world is meditative and serene
tropical world is riotous and kooky
cave world is mysterious and dramatic
The worlds will be complex and interesting to explore, either alone or as a group. They will be interconnected so the children can move between them: they can catch a ride in the geyser that shoots up from the cave world to the sky world; they can slide down the rainbow back to the tropical world. In addition to exploring Starbright World, they will be able to access commercial video and computer games from within the playspace.
By the end of the year (1995) we will have completed the basic infrastructure, providing a seed from which other parts of the world can grow:
Besides choosing from existing designs, children will be able to create their own 2D and 3D avatars, either by assembling them from a selection of parts or by drawing the avatars themselves. There will be a Hall of Identity where anyone can go to find out who is behind which avatar, partly so a child maintains responsibility for his or her actions, partly for the delight of being able to show off their alter ego.
We will add other communal spaces where children can congregate and meet. For instance there could be a jukebox at the Jet Stream Cafe where children could listen to music and watch music videos - both commercial products and ones they make themselves. Children who speak sign language, for instance, could make sign language versions of some of the songs in the juke box. Children will be able to just hang out with friends in front of the waterfall, or go to a trading post, where they could exchange that magic wand that doesn't work any more for a jet pack that does. There can be central meeting places like an Events Kiosk, which tells about special activities planned for that week.
Children who access Starbright World regularly, and who can handle passwords and logging in and out of their own accounts, will be able to have places of their own that they can fill with images and (virtual) objects, where they and they alone can control what stays the same and what changes. They can furnish this place by choosing from a selection of objects, or create the furnishings themselves. It will be possible for them to bring drawings, photographs and objects to the hospital to be scanned in, to provide a tie to life at home, and to print out images and objects acquired within Starbright World to take back home. Beyond the personal spaces, the children could work together with Starbright volunteer "Worldbuilders" to design more complicated public spaces and buildings.
The world will be populated with a wide range of inhabitants: some are the avatars of other children; some are dolls, robots and toys that children could design and control themselves. Some are vehicles that they can drive, and some are animals that will carry them on their backs - if they can charm the animals into being friends! As computer scientists do further research on "autonomous agents", we will develop programmed creatures (which may look like people, animals, plants or objects!) that interact with the children with increasing sophistication.
There will be various means of communication: a child will be able to talk to a group of people or call a single friend on a cellular telephone, or hold video conferences with other children and see what they look like in real life. Bedridden children could be taken by other children on virtual field trips, carrying a camera which serves as their "virtual eyes." Children will also be able to write messages that pop up on the screen, send them to private mailboxes, or post them on a public bulletin board.
Volunteer Starbright "camp counselors" could help children stage a play within the existing space, or a guest playwright could write a new play just for Starbright World, and help the children create a new region in the World as the "stage set". Children can watch a movie together in a group at the cinema, hold birthday parties in their private rooms, organize their own bands and hold a concert at the "outdoor" stage, playing virtual musical instruments that make noise just like real ones. Children will be able to take "photographs" of the event and hang them on the wall of their private rooms, and it will be possible to print them out to show the folks back home what they did while in the hospital. Or they can stage a story with other avatars or just with dolls, take a series of photographs, and thereby create a book.
Activities don't have to be limited to mental games played by clicking buttons. While many benefits of the Starbright World come from allowing children to break free of their ailing bodies, it can also be used in physical therapy to reclaim those bodies. Virtual reality input devices like data gloves and bodysuits can be used to give the children whole body input and feedback. Boring, repetitive exercise can become a source of delight if the child uses the motion to move through a fantastical virtual landscape.
To go beyond the intrinsic benefits of entertainment and empowerment, we will work together with medical specialists and the children themselves to develop Starbright therapeutic intervention software. Using techniques such as relaxation therapy and bio-feedback, this software develops the children's ability to cope with their illness and pain. As many of these children are fighting life-threatening diseases, we also should be prepared from the start to deal with the death of a child who has been an inhabitant of the Starbright World. Perhaps there could be a place where their friends and family can go to honor their memory, to grieve for them, and to leave mementos of their friendship for the dead child.
In conclusion, the Starbright World is a world, not a game; a process, not an object. It will never be completed, but always be undergoing change, just as the real world is always in change. As in the real world, there will be old, familiar things and old, familiar friends, as well as new and different things and new and different friends. It will give seriously ill children a place where they can come out of their isolation, forget their illness, and be children again.
Starbright World 3D virtual world archive
Starbright Foundation merged with the Starlight Foundation in 2004.
Bruckman, Amy, "Identity Workshop: Emergent Social and Psychological Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Reality", MIT Media Lab
See this page for link to ftp download: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/papers/old-papers.html#IW (link as of 2015-10-25)
Bruckman, Amy, and Resnick, Mitchel, "Virtual Professional Community: Results from the MediaMOO Project", MIT Media Lab
Anonymous ftp from media.mit.edu in the file pub/asb/papers/MediaMOO-3cyberconf.txt (outdated?)
Curtis, Pavel, "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities", Xerox PARC, 1992
Anonymous ftp from parcftp.xerox.com in the file pub/MOO/papers/DIAC92.{ps, txt} (outdated?)
Morningstar, Chip and Farmer, Randall, "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat", Cyberspace: First Steps, MIT Press, 1991, Michael Benedikt, editor.
http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Worlds/LucasfilmHabitat.html (link as of 2015-10-25)
Many thanks to Starbright World Executive Producer David Marvit, for inspiration and many long talks about what Starbright World could become!