VCUHK: Integrating the Real into a 3D Campus in Networked Virtual Worlds

The rapid development of World Wide Web and the dominance of networked computers for information transfer and communication have enabled the rise of virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life™). This paper introduces our virtual campus-Virtual CUHK (VCUHK) project which builds a 3D virtual campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in networked virtual worlds. VCUHK is a 3D shared networked virtual world of the real campus of CUHK built with Open Simulator platform, an open source virtual world server project that has an adaptation of the basic server functionality of the Second Life™ servers. The real CUHK campus occupies approximately the area of 2 square km with hilly terrain and diverse and unique landscape, and has a great number of buildings with very sophisticated architecture. By using Second Life™ viewer (an open source 3D virtual world viewer) or other compatible viewers, users can access VCUHK from any Internet-connected personal computer running MS windows or Linux. Users can immerse in VCUHK being anything with the form of 3D modeling avatar and experience virtual education and other diverse campus activities.