Starbright World

» see starbrightworld.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Planning started in 1993. The Starbright Foundation, a charity chaired by Steven Spielberg and a sister organization to the Starlight Children's Foundation, wanted to solve a specific problem: a child in long term hospital treatment is isolated from other children, including the only other children who understand what is happening to them. The answer they funded was a 3D virtual world in which those kids could meet as avatars. Worlds Inc built it with Tamiko Thiel as creative director, Sprint and Intel supplied the network and the machines, and the development cost was described at the time only as being in the multimillions.

It launched on 8 November 1995 with four hospitals connected. The connection is the part that dates it: this did not run over the public internet but over private DS3 circuits leased to link the hospitals directly to each other, because in 1995 nothing else would carry it. Inside, children could talk to each other and build things, and the system carried live video between rooms. Spielberg appeared in the world as E.T. and Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who ran fundraising for the foundation, appeared as a teddy bear.

The ambition was ahead of what the hardware could do. A New York Times writer found it slow and clumsy and short of things to actually do. A pilot study recorded serious technical difficulties in roughly a quarter of sessions, improving as the study went on but never disappearing. In 1997 the 3D world was switched off over exactly those complaints.

What replaced it in July 1998 was a private social network, and that is the version that lasted. By 2000 it was running in eighty American hospitals, and later versions could be reached from home once a patient was discharged. It went offline on 31 August 2015, without much of a notice, after nineteen years of a charity paying to keep a website running for a few thousand children at a time.

~ the dossier ~

~ the first version ~

The 3D world had an area called BYOZ, short for Build Your Own Zone, where children could construct objects and put them somewhere other children would find them. That is a small feature with an obvious purpose. A hospital room is a place where almost nothing is yours and almost nothing you do changes anything, and a zone with your name on it inverts both of those at once.

It is usually credited as one of the first real applications of virtual reality in medicine, which is true and slightly beside the point. Two children on leased lines between two cities, both bald and both bored, is the entire therapeutic mechanism, and the 3D engine was mostly the excuse to build the circuit.

~ the second version ~

The 1998 rebuild dropped the avatars and became message boards and live chat, keeping the videoconferencing that had been there from the beginning. It was accessible only from terminals inside partner hospitals at first, which kept the population closed and the moderation tractable.

The strange thing about Starbright World, compared to every other online community of its era, is that it has a peer-reviewed literature. Clinical trials were run on it, measuring what the thing did to patients' reported symptoms and quality of life. Nobody was running randomized trials on whether Neopets was good for you. This was a social network with an ethics committee attached, which is what happens when the users are minors in active treatment and the operator is a medical charity.

~ what got buried with it ~

I was eleven years old and in Turkey when this launched, on a country's worth of dial-up that would not arrive in my house for another three years, and no part of it was reachable from where I was. That is the honest version. The less obvious distance is that Starbright World was private on purpose, running first on leased lines and then behind a login, so there is no crawlable record of what was said inside it. Most dead sites leave an archive. This one was designed not to.

The residue it did leave is ugly. Worlds Inc kept patents from the Starbright World work and spent the 2000s and 2010s asserting that they covered the concept of multiplayer virtual worlds, suing game companies on that basis. The Activision Blizzard case was dismissed in 2021 when a federal district court held the patents were abstract ideas and not patentable. So the surviving public trace of a charity project for sick children is a line of failed patent litigation against the games industry.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »