The Caracol Time Travel Project

Virtual drama is based on the use of a shareable virtual world as a stage setting, with avatars controlled by actors and audience members. The Caracol Time Travel Project was an experiment in the use of virtual drama for learning about archaeology. Eighteen undergraduate students at the University of Central Florida used a locally developed Javabased system for sharing VRML worlds. They designed and constructed a virtual drama to teach basic concepts of Mesoamerican archaeology and the cultural history of the ancient Maya for middle schools. This paper presents their story design and details of the system we developed to support interaction in this shared virtual world. We then discuss performance issues, lessons learned and newer features that we did not have available at the time. Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.