PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In the Fall 2018 semester, members of Brown Esports — or BEST, a student organization dedicated to online gaming — began the painstaking process of creating, brick-by-brick, a digital version of Brown’s College Hill campus in Minecraft, the ever-popular virtual world sandbox game.

Fast-forward a year and a half into that effort: the coronavirus pandemic began its spread across the U.S. this March and forced hundreds of colleges and universities, including Brown, to shutter their classrooms and most residence halls for the rest of spring. And the BEST project found itself with a new level of urgency.

“When coronavirus hit and we all were sent home, I thought: ‘Wouldn’t it be really, really awesome to have this project done right now, so that we can have everybody be able to visit campus away from home?’” said Isaac Kim, a first-year BEST member studying cognitive science.

The project is creating in Minecraft a 1-to-1 scale, three-dimensional model of Brown’s many buildings and greenspaces that can be inhabited and explored — essentially, “lived in” — by community members through the online game’s virtual avatars, Kim said.

On March 22, BEST opened its Minecraft campus to members of the Brown community. Through a partnership with Geopipe — a company, co-founded by Brown alumnus Thomas Dickerson, that uses machine learning algorithms and aerial imagery to create 3D models of cities — BEST was able to access an accurate Minecraft map of the entire exterior of Brown’s campus.

Next, the group invited students, alumni, faculty and staff to sign up to help them add details to the exteriors of each campus building — and to create the interiors of each from scratch. To date, 67 undergraduates, graduate students and alumni have answered the call and are building away.