Betaville

Betaville is an open-source multiplayer environment for real cities, in which ideas for new works of public art, architecture, urban design, and development can be shared, discussed, tweaked, and brought to maturity in context, and with the kind of broad participation people take for granted in open source software development.

The project was launched as a collaboration between Carl Skelton at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Martin Koplin, Helmut Eirund, and Thorsten Teschke at the Media2Culture Institute for Applied Media Technology at the Hochschule Bremen in the summer of 2008. The web client and server applications are maturing nicely. The associated web services are also robust; touchscreen and mobile applications are in the works.

Carl has brought Betaville to the Greenhouse with him, along with its growing community and some compelling implementations, from new York City to Busan (South Korea), Toronto, Bremen, and Istanbul, with more in the works.