Activeworlds Maps

These are pictures of AlphaWorld taken in December of 1996, February of 1998, August 1999, and again in August of 2001 by Activeworlds.  Notice how the community has populated the land with more buildings over the years, turning it into a Virtual Metropolis.  Each full picture is 2000x2000 pixels and covers the area between 1000n 1000w and 1000s 1000e, with ground zero being the center of the picture. The total area covered is about 400sq kilometers, and would take you over 2 hours to walk directly from one end to another (that is, two hours in AlphaWorld - it would obviously take much longer in real life). Despite their size, these pictures represent about .3% (that's one third of one percent) of the total area of AlphaWorld.

December of 1996	February of 1998
August of 1999	August of 2001

You can see the "starfish" shape of building as people crowd their buildings along the North-South axis and the "equator" of AlphaWorld, and as they build along the coordinates with matching numbers. (i.e. 200n 200w, 450s 450e, etc) Some do this so that their coordinates are easy to remember, and others are simply building onto what others have already built.

To see the FULL pictures in all their 2000x2000 pixel glory, simply click on the images above. The pictures are around 270k, and will take a few minutes to fully display in full resolution. (To obtain the pictures, Activeworlds wrote a program to scan the AlphaWorld database and examine each "cell"; of AlphaWorld and assign it to one pixel in the picture - giving it the color most prominent in that area.)

This project was started in 1999, when theAlphaWorld mapper was created by Greg Roelofs and Pieter van der Meulen, originally as a research project at a certain large electronics company, and now as a private project.

After August 2001, Alphaworld became to large to be able to continue creating these maps and we stopped creating them. The last one from 2001 took several days to create even on very powerful computers.