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This all reminds me of VRML, which was popular about 10 years ago. I distinctly remember trolling around CyberTown, which was very similar to Second Life (with comparable graphics, at least as far as I can remember being that it was so long ago). In theory, anyone could have hosted a VRML space, linking to it from the many walkways and doors in CyberTown, though I don't recall whether this was common. The whole thing was kind of neat for the time, but I really couldn't see anything like it becoming more than just a chat room (maybe a step forward for sims?)

Or it was a few years ago... Star Trek Voice Print

Last time I looked Cybertown and NeoPets were heavily into the Happy (un)Fun Cult. (Neopets are also marketing survery spammers.)

Why is this news?

My favorite 3d world is Cybertown. Easily programmable, flexible worlds, personal community, the works. But the best part is v2.0 Cybertown NextGeneration with a truely seamless world.

My favorite 3d world is Cybertown. Easily programmable, flexible worlds, personal community, the works. But the best part is v2.0 Cybertown NextGeneration with a truely seamless world.

Somebody did that, in the heyday of VRML, around 1997-1998. You could buy real estate. They even had the monorail. The world filled up with giant monuments full of advertising, the first 3D spam.

Try CyberTown, which is about as good as VRML gets today.

The reason peer to peer sharing technologies are currently doomed is that, if they're successful, there will be considerably more than a sensible number of people on the air.

I've been on Gnutella when half the net went there, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. Like most people, I had to hang up or get overwhelmed.

A similar problem has come up in shared VR. If a tenth of the people who signed on to Cybertown showed up at the same time, it would be madness. If the net is a "never-ending worldwide conversation", as Judge Steward Dalzell said, then a conversation of 10 million or 10,000 people, when you can't tune any of them out, is a conversation in Bedlam.

The easy problem is how to filter out the noise. The hard problem is trying to figure out what, to a particular user at a particular time, is signal and what is noise. Area of interest culling is only a partial solution. While I might be interested in erotic photographs of large aquatic mammals today, I'm not exclusively interested in Flipper and his friends. I might be interested tomorrow in the polyphonic motets of Lassus.

An even harder problem is identifying which of a particular set of resources offered that are allegedly within my current areas of interest are of actual interest. I'm not interested at all, for example, in Flipper stills of the Ranger and the stupid kids, and I already have the picture where Flipper stands on his tail. While the file name conventions that have arisen among mp3 file sharers are a step in the right direction (and they picked an easy domain), the conventions are far from universal, and as people have found out, sometimes spoofed and sometimes just ignorantly wrong.

(I'm tempted to say that a central server that acts like a Library of Congress classification system may be needed, and certainly would be a more useful role for a central server than mere file name storing.)

And, of course, this must be accomplished without the overhead that makes Gnutella such a pig. And remember, Gnutella hardly tries to accomplish any of this area of interest culling.

While the developers of Gnutella et al have spent considerable time on networking technology and user interfaces (despite appearances!), they haven't yet taken more than baby steps toward solving the real problem that will make peer-to-peer sink or swim: determining and using areas of interest.

Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

• VZones, the inheritors of the Habitat legacy.
• ActiveWorlds aka Alphaworld, VRML-like without using VRML, the most impressive of the bunch.
• Blaxxun, actually does use VRML but looks like IRC with a VRML plug-in viewer tacked on top
• The Palace, made by the original Habitat authors, doesn't have any pretense of being 3D so it focuses more on chat.
• Rational Rose for yet another webbrowser with avatars built in.

The golden era of VRML was when Netscape was the number one Web browser and Netscape's own VRML browser Live3D (nee WebFX, became Cosmo Player) was included in the Netscape bundle most people downloaded.

But within 6 months it had become clear that Netscape itself had gotten so big (and Cosmo Player and the others had gotten so big) that bundling the two together gave an unacceptably large download. And so, VRML browsers were unbundled.

Add in some serious Netscape bugs that grievously affected VRML browsers but didn't affect HTML page viewing much (and therefore were low priority on Netscape's fix list) and some absurd hopefulness that Ma and Pa Kettle wouldn't mind installing a plugin that (briefly) was regarded as being as easy to install as a DOS game, and the mindshare was lost.

And because VRML worlds weren't exactly ubiquitous themselves (building 3D is hard -- building effective 3D is real hard), a substantial number of people upgraded their Netscape installation (or replaced it with a MSIE installation) without ever knowing that they used to have built in VRML browsing capability and didn't any more.

This was the occasion for the first of what have become regular biennial events: The Death of VRML (film at 11).

X3D (sorta aka VRML 2001) is intended to break the ubiquity barrier. Trouble is, XML, on which it's based, is gaining mindshare at a pace that can optimistically be called glacial. Hell, how many web sites even have style sheets, for chrissakes?

VRML has got a couple of niches now. One of them, the "3D community" niche is a pretty big one -- three quarters of a million people have visited Cybertown long enough to sign up as members and a good percentage of them participate in the full 3D experience (informal observation). But in comparison to the 2D web, that's chicken feed.

An application that I think is really going to take off in another niche is Geo VRML where 3D geodata can be used to immeasurably improve the "you are there" experience of maps. Again, a niche, although it's one I'm personally excited about.

And there have been some other really brilliant applications of 3D on the Web that together make up a third niche. You can find a number of them on my site and on about.com -- Sandy's links are better maintained than mine. Let's call that niche "hardcore 3Dheads", among whom I number myself.

But in order for 3D to break out of those niches, it's got to be on every desktop. Huge plugins or controls to download and add to an already bloated Web browser won't do it.

Nor will a new and improved standard or pseudostandard for 3D on the Web. VRML 97 has got plenty of headroom. Not one 3D world in 20 uses the simple but (if I do say so myself) fairly effective color, lighting, and animation tricks in this dolphin, for example.

But until there's a way to get 3D into everybody's Web browser, or using some other means onto everybody's desktop, I'm not optimistic about the future of 3D on the web.

A big product of there is http://www.cybertown.com/main_nsframes.html. IT is really cool after you set up an avitar of your own. You can shop and chat and do all sorts of things, including buying a virtual home and have a virtual job.

Okay maybe this is not exactly what they guy was talking about. But he did say 'virtual communities' and did not really define what he meant. Sure you can infer, but that only leads to speculation.

Hey I have virtual friends. People I have only chatted with on line does that count? I do have real frineds too though.

I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!