Mauz's Active Worlds Pages: Pictures

Screenshots Screenshots by Digigardener AlphaWorld Avatars March 1998 Other Pictures

Screenshots

Here are some screenshots that I have taken in Active Worlds:

Screenshots by Digigardener

Here are some very early AlphaWorld screenshots kindly provided by Bruce Damer (Digigardener) of The Contact Consortium, who also has a site with writings and papers on AW and virtual worlds:

(Click a picture to see it full-size)

This is what he says about them:

"I entered AW for the first time on Aug 31 1995. These screen shots were taken on Sept 7, 1995 and show key scenes of AW at Build 30, windows 3.1 in summer 95. They may be the earliest surviving screen shots. You will see some well known folks. I did run into both Protagonist and Da5id (Dave Gobel) during this period, altho they are not in these shots. DNormalguy and Dataman do appear here along with me and some others.

Note the very first issue of the New World Times superimposed over the shot of the first newsstand.

The "little red schoolhouse" and old GZ are featured here too. A live teleport landing shot of someone else landing before me (a rare shot even today) are there."

AlphaWorld Avatars March 1998

MrTourist - MsTourist - CY - Lori - James - Butch
Virgil - Rick - Dredd - Harold - Helmut - Hotep
Aaron - Ken - Jenna - Shanubia - Shred - Tanya
Cedric - Gray - Vanessa - Birde - Sarah - Rachel
Shredd - Willy - Alicia - Becca - Kim - Bike
Morjay - Todd - Philippe

Article Scans

Here are some pictures that I scanned (poorly ;) from articles about AW in the Finnish computer magazine MikroBitti in 1996 and 1997:

199602 199602 199605 199605 199605 199605 199605 199605 199609 199708 199708 199708 199708

Here is an article about the now expired Arctic world from a Finnish computer newspaper, probably Tietoviikko, in October 18, 1996:

199610

Translation:

Avatar World Gets Finnish Colour
Nokia Research Center has joined the virtual avatar worlds on the Internet. It has implemented an ad-driven Arctic Light net community on their server, with the Finnish nature and culture as its leading theme.
Arctic Light is directly connected to other 3D virtual worlds that have been developed with the same Active Worlds technology by a U.S. corporation Worlds Inc. NRC has licensed the technology for their own use.
Arctic Light, which is open for all users, is an excellent way for Nokia to explore what kind of communication services and applications are in demand on the net.
According to the director of the Video Technology Lab, Hannu Salminen, NRC is especially interested in linking video conferencing with virtual environments.
There are other virtual worlds coming on Finnish servers as well.
ICL Data is planning to start a service in Finland that uses the WorldsAway technology by Fujitsu. Technical Director Heikki Honkio believes that avatars will be a significant factor in the Internet content business, for instance when integrated into corporate websites.
(Caption) Virtual Steam. Arctic Light even lets you go to sauna with other avatars.
By Antti Oksanen

2007-12-31