The idea of virtual reality first appeared in a science fiction novel called Simulacron-3 published by Daniel Galouye, in 1964. It is the story of a virtual world complete with simulacrum that eventually began to experience consciousness.
In 1984 William Gibson coined the word cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer, a story about a down and out computer hacker hired by a unexplained boss. He defined cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions." This was considered an early cyber punk book.
One of the later cyber punk books, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (1992), is where we first hear the word avatar used to describe a person’s representation in virtual reality. "..when the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a 'snow crash.'"
The science fiction series Otherland (Williams, 1996), speaks of a future where Internet accessibility to virtual worlds is common place and its publication coincided with the public release of Activeworlds on the actual Internet.
Now fiction and reality were one! Activeworlds is system where the user enters a 3-dimensional space via their computer browser and interacts with it using an avatar. What one’s avatar encounters in Activeworlds are surroundings and objects that have been created by other avatars as well as themselves. This environment differs from gaming because you are not locked in a scenario built into a video or role-playing game. You are actually in a multi-user visual environment (MUVE) collaborating with other users, sometimes observing, sometimes interacting, and sometimes creating.
Linden Lab’s virtual world called Second Life just celebrated its fifth birthday on June 23, 2008.
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