Self-Developing a MUVE for Research and Educational Innovations - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 453

Chapter 24
Self-Developing a
MUVE for Research and
Educational Innovations

Nick V. Flor
University of New Mexico, USA

ABSTRACT

Multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) researchers need to create their own virtual worlds and to stop
waiting for industry to create innovations. The technology and instructional materials for creating virtual
worlds have advanced to the point where a single person, unaided, can develop a virtual world that is
suitable for experimentation—even though it may lack the aesthetics of commercially available worlds.
The aim of this chapter is to demystify the development of virtual worlds by describing the fundamental
skill set you must acquire to self-develop a virtual world. The skills are: modeling, texturing, animation,
and programming. The author focuses on two of these skills, modeling and texturing, and describe a
set of core techniques for creating the exterior of a virtual world. By practicing and building on these
techniques, one can create the interiors and characters for more complex MUVES.

INTRODUCTION

Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia. And what is
astonishing is the simplicity of the technology
underlying these sites. Many were built initially
by one or two individuals in several weeks or less.
For example, the technology for EBay was created
by a single person over a Labor Day weekend
as part of an exercise in internet programming
(Cohen, 2003, p. 4).
Unfortunately, many information systems
researchers seem content to be stenographers of
industry—using statistical and qualitative tech-
niques from the natural sciences to essentially

As both an information systems and a new me-
dia researcher, I find it frustrating that we are in
the midst of a technology revolution, yet unlike
the natural sciences where academia leads the
discovery of innovations, it is industry that is
leading the discoveries. For instance, the dot-
com revolution yielded innovative Web sites and
social networking services like eBay, YouTube,

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61692-822-3.ch024