The Birth of There Inc.

by JJ Ventrella
(latest update of this page: July 14, 2007)

Will and Jeffrey Join Forces In March of 1997, Will Harvey was skiing on the slopes of the Matterhorn, where he had a vision. He sent a long fax to me describing a vision of a wonderful virtual world, filled with action, where people can meet each other virtually, even though they may be on opposite sides of the (real) world. Will invited me to help him prototype this world, help build a vision, and help invent a new way of creating online experiences. Thus began the story of There. Will began gathering some angel investment. For a year, we both coded like mad, took long walks, and drew many pictures. A year later, Will founded the company, and invited me to be the co-founder. That was spring of 1998.

The name "There" We needed a name, so Will suggested we go get a sushi dinner, drink sake's and do a brainstorm. I grabbed a napkin and started scribbling words. We tried to find words that described the essence of the vision, the strong sense of place, and the realness of the world which is not this world. I scribbled down the word "There", and immediately Will's hand came down hard on the table, and he said with glee, "That's it!". We each immediately downed two more glasses of sake. Not only was this word descriptive the possibilities of word-play with "There" were irresistible.

A Dynamic World Buzzing with Life
We did plenty of experimentation with physical simulation, planetary geometry, avatars, and the interactions of simulated objects. Since Will and I are both engineers, we both took a very parametric, procedural approach to creating the content of the world. We considered ourselves artists whose canvas was code.

Springy Physics The squash-and-stretch of classic animation was an inspiration. These early experiments gave rise to a strategy for creating motion that was fundamental to our world in the early days, and influenced animators over the years, as the purely procedural techniques gave way to hybrid forms.

We prototyped an extensive planetary geometry system, based on some icosahedral modeling and a GIS system I had heard about many years ago for sub-dividing a geodesic dynamically. This inspired the eventual planetary physics that Will and I continued to advocate throughout the company's history.

A Creation of Many Great Minds
So many amazing people passed through the doors of There and contributed to the vision and execution - some of them stayed on for many years and became pillars. Tim Nufire came on soon after the company was founded. He helped prototype "ThereTV" - an idea for projecting real-life events in There. Tim didn't stay too long. Soon after that, Amy Morris joined to help with administrative matters - she ended up staying quite a while and also helped foster a social culture at There. Ken Duda (with more brain-power between his ears than a hundred programmers), came aboard as the CTO, right around the same time as Brett Durrett. Both of them were friends and ex-colleagues of Will. Brett and Ken were two of the most solid and hard-working people at There, for many years. Then came Mel Guymon, a computer graphics guru, who helped build the art production line, and provided brain-power to many complex problems.

I could go on. And on. But at this point I've already forgotten the chronological order of people joining, and I have to stop somewhere! Here's a list of as many people as I can come up with (with a little help from Google). In alphabetical order:

Sonny Abello, Darren Allarde, Alejandro Samina Arif, Stacey Artandi, Doug Banks, Stephanie Barrientos, Floyd Bates, John Beckwith, Eileen Belton, Bruce Benda, Howard Berkey III, Karuna Bhavnani, James Birchler, Roland Blanton, Stewart Bonn, Bruce Boston, Ernesto Bravo, David T. Brown, Kristen Burmester, Alex Burmester, Veann Cao, Jeanne Carey, Don Carson, Sean Castro, Ann Mei Chang, Margaret Chen, Julie Chin, Chuck Clanton, Dave Coathupe, Ross Cohen, Robert Coli, Nicole Craine, Michael Constant, Matt Danzig, Kelle DeForrest, Michael Depoe, Steve Dollins, Andy Donkin, Vaz Douglas, Evan Driscoll, Ken Duda, Brett Durrett, Christine Ebangi, Brett Edman, Tim Ellis, James Fang, Elias Fedorowski, Leonard Fisher, Andy Fong, Matthew Ford, Will Francis, Sheila Fruge, Douglas Fulton, John Gabriel, Bryan Galdrikian, Matthew Ganote, Tony Gascon, Robert Gehorsam, Barry Gleeson, David Glenn, Mausumi Ghosh, Ari Goldstein, Kathy Gowell, Eliot Greenfield, Edmund Grossenbacher, Colin Gunn, Mel Guymon, Meredith Hagedorn, Ed Hall, Purple Hampton, Malcolm Handley, J.P. Harrod, Will Harvey, Scott Hartley, John Hayes, Charles Haynes, Carl Higashionna, Makiko Honda, Jonathan Hudgins, Julie Hsieh, Lee Anne Hwang, Sharon Jacks, Clarence Johnson, Dale Johnson, Leland Jones, James Kasyan, Matt Kaufman, Alex Keim, Amy Jo Kim, Jessica Koeppel, Eric Koon, Everett Kotler, Nate Klee, Archana Krishna, Ziad El Kurjie, Laura Kusumoto, Ti-Ning Kwa, Richard Larm, Karen Laur, Song Lee Andy Lee, Vickie Lee, John Leidlein, Jennifer Leon, Matt MacGregor, Tom Maddox, Craig Maitlen, Adam Marks, Sean Marr, Gaurav Mathur, Robert McGinn, Jason McHugh, Tom Melcher, Alex Moon, Amy Morris, Kevin Mounts, Doug Muise, Beth Munger, Matty Murakami, Lauren Myers, David Nadler, Franklin Naval, Tiffany Nelson, Thanh Nguyen, Mitch Nibbelink, Tim Nufire, Taura Null, Jim Ochi, Paige O'Donoghue, Serguei Osokine, Fernando Paiz, Kate Paiz, Roman Pangilinan, Kandarp Patel, Lee Pearson, Brent Pease, Shannon Perkins, Jennifer Perry, Shannon Pierce, Mel Pleasant, Sivaraman Prabhu, Kristen Regelein, David Richardson, Mariangela Sassi, Rebecca Shearin, Greg Slovacek, Kiaran Snyder, Richard Stanton, Taryn Stoddard, Tanya Regan, Kris Renkewitz, Eric Ries, Rosita Roberts, Deborah Robbins, Clarke Robinson, David Roland, Eric Rollins, Linda Rossettos, Fred Quintana, Matt Samet, Sabine Sandersen, Cary Sandvig, Dan Samuel, Nathan Schrenk, Satyen Sheth, Sun-Inn Shih, Keiko Shinoda, Ingrid Singer, Brian Singerman, Lauren Smith, Jan Snyder, Tim Spencer, Janice Spivak, Jeffrey Steefel, Richard Steiger, C. Keiki Stacy Steve Stadnicki, Lou Talamo, Katherine Tom, David True, Tuong Truong, Anne Truscott, Clare Tuma, Kirsten Unger, Andrew Veluswami, Jeffrey Ventrella, Steve Victorino, David Wagner, William Wagner, Jearld Waitkus, Kevin Wang, Hal Wasserman, Jon Watte, David Weekly, Mike Weiner, Ben Werther, Andrew Williams, Mike Wilson, David Wixom, Carol Wood, Phillip Woodall, Conrad Wong, Brian Wyser, George Yakovlev, Steve Yen, Megumi Yokomizo, Carol Yoon, Tong Zhu, Ruth Zona,

(if I forgot anyone, let me know! - Jeffrey@Ventrella.com. Also, let me know if you have any links I can add to a name).

Also, check out this page I found with a list of the Creators of There:
http://www.celtic-life.net/creators_of_there.htm,

The story of There's evolution is a story with many chapters and stages of development, yet with a constant, unchanging vision. As new players joined the team, this vision did not dilute, but only became stronger.

OK, I lied. Eventually, the vision started to dilute, as a natural process, while more people’s ideas for how the business should be run added to the mix. Indeed, we were embarking on a whole new kind of creation - it is not a straightforward puzzle to solve. Building the Metaverse is not easy.

Here is an interview with Will, where he discusses his impression of the changes at There:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/05/28/news_6099558.html


So, What's There?

What exactly is There? It is a 3D online world where you can meet people, buy things, form clubs, have a dog, a dune buggy, a hoverboard, and a house. Members have formed a radio station, and scores of web pages have been published by members promoting their virtual goods, and describing their life There. Some of the people who have worked on There have reported cases in which their mothers have tried it out and since become hardcore addicts. It's a pretty cool place, I must say!

Avatar-Centric Communication

Central to the charm of There is something we called "Avatar-centric Communication", or "ACC" for short. the way our avatars express, communicate, and generate text in comic-book-style chat balloons over their heads. We had invented a way of expressing yourself as a virtual human with "body language". The image above shows a scene from the original prototype that I created showing many of the inventions that became central to ACC in There. (click image to enlarge)

Years before, I had observed that avatars in virtual worlds were stiff, un-expressive, and literally a waste of CPU and screenspace (users of online virtual worlds just read the continually flowing chat text, and didn't bother looking at their clunky avatars. Why should they? All the interesting stuff was happening in "chat-space".

We changed that. Chat belongs "There". It belongs in the world where your body is, and it should be accompanied by plenty of body language. Otherwise, why even bother having a body? And furthermore, since this is "virtual" reality, why not emit abstract blobs of expressive protoplasm, as a way to express yourself? It's just a form of visual language - another way to take advantage of the rich 3D world that your avatar occupies.

Tom Melcher, the CEO at the time, focused the vision of the company in this direction at a time when we were trying to position ourselves as either part of, or outside of, the computer games market (something which we had struggled with throughout our whole history). Tom recognized an important collection of ideas and technologies that had accumulated at There, mostly avatar-related technologies that I had invented, as derived from the earlier prototypes of avatar animation with Will. Tom pushed the social aspects of There, and during his stay. Around that time, Chuck Clanton joined, and became a key player in the invention and realization of ACC. Chuck is a game designer, a marble sculptor, has a Ph.D. in Psychology and Computer Science from Stanford, and also has an MD and worked in medicine for years - a true Renaissance man. Chuck and I worked together for more than a year on the fundamentals of ACC, with lots of help and input from various engineers and artists. Here are a few links pertaining to a talk that Chuck and I did at Stanford, on ACC, in April of 2003: http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/abstracts/02-03/030404-clanton.html

We had worked out a whole system of combining chat text entry with the triggering of expression. The key being a way of interleaving text and facial/body expression on a word-by-word basis, as opposed to the sentence-at-a-time method being used at the time in other virtual worlds. An 'ACC' team graduallt accumulated, and this team continued to develop more features, and refinements to the original idea. Key people were Fernando Paiz, Ko Patel, Janice Spivak, Mel Guymon, Matt Danzig...and others (sorry to those I didn't mention - rusty memory and all that). You can think of ACC as the next evolution in punctuation, taking advantage of the real-time, interactive realm of online communication.

Avatar Genetics

I was the main author of There's first US patent, with co-authors, Will Harvey and Ben Werther (who was with us for a short period). This patent covered the basic concept of a parametric description of a human, including many behavioral aspects, encoded in a compact form which is lightweight, and generalized. I designed a genetic system which could produce the likenesses of many recognizable personalities. The company did not fully take advantage of the genetic power of this technology, partly because this approach conflicted with a strict artistic approach to designing avatar faces and body types. We did however come up with a hybrid approach, which, I believe is the key to avatar technology in the future (see this text I wrote a few years ago which touches upon this idea: http://www.ventrella.com/Alife/avatar_animation.html ). And here is a paper I wrote on Avatar Physics and Genetics presented at a Paris conference on Virtual Worlds in 2000.

I've Barely Scratched the Surface
This page provides only a brief introduction. As with most other web page work I do, it is, and will probably always be UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Hopefully, at each stage of punctuated equilibrium, it will tell a story. It is of course my story, and there are more than a hundred other stories to tell - some of them may not be all that positive. In this page, I have chosen to focus mostly on the positive aspects.


If you are curious of what is going on There at this time, check it out. It continues to evolve.



-JJ Ventrella