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Who needs any of these when you have the opportunity to go back ti Microsoft Comic Chat? http://www.digitalspace.com/avatars/cc1.jpg

Billions of dollars in capital and they give us a retread of AlphaWorld from 1996? What's next, GoogleMUD?

A MUD hosted by Google...that would be so retro-awesome! I still have a copy of TinyFugue laying around.

Billions of dollars in capital and they give us a retread of AlphaWorld from 1996? What's next, GoogleMUD?

There was something called WorldsAway. A 2d multi-user graphical chat world, heavily promoted by CompuServe at the time. I don't remember it being very good, but still going and is now called VZones. Intro demo is worth a laugh.

Then try out Traveler. Requires no 3d accelerator card, uses CPU only, and has a great community with great people. http://digitalspace.com/traveler/index.html And find me on the Tech Worlds server :)

As far as VR communities go, there are still a number that exist today. One of the best close knit community style ones is Traveler, which you can find here: http://digitalspace.com/traveler/index.html which has been around since early 1996. Although the ownership has changed hands a number of years ago. It is still actively visited by regulars like myself and many others. It's definitely a unique environment and has a friendly community.

You mean this? It has voice as well, works with connections as slow as 28.8 dialup.

It's like it is 1999 all over again!. Lets do the time warp again...

BrahmsVE model of the Space Station and the Personal Satellite Assistant
We did these simulations approximately middle of last year. You can watch the movies on the website, but to watch the live simulation, ou will need to install Adobe Atmosphere (IE only, ActiveX, evil etc) and it runs really badly, but it shows a simulated "Search And Report" scenerio for the PSA in the ISS.
Oh, and the one they are building for working outside is called RoboNaut, it looks like the torso and arms of a human (no legs), with five fingers and all, so it can use human's tools.

Does anyone have any publications from 1985 mentioning avatars in the 'Habitat' game? If so, then the OED would presumably be interested.

This web page, and others say:
In 1985 at Lucasfilm, the inventor Chip Morningstar, working with his colleague Randall Farmer, created Habitat,... Chip needed a term to describe the digital personification of users in the Habitat worlds and he chose the word avatar, for its meaning from Hindu theology...

I was a compuserve member way back when the internet was hard to get onto (you couldn't access the net from compuserve when I first signed up). They looked deep into my soul and gave me a number based upon the order in which I joined. About when they let me choose a screen name for myself (all_the_good_names_are_taken@compuserve.com I kid you not.) they introduced this thing called Worlds Away which seems eerily like "there."

The keyword you typed at the go prompt was AWAY, so youd type GO: AWAY and be transported to a virtual world which had all the usuall compuserve anal retentive rules to keep everyone playing nice.

I've since left compuserve due to the cost of access and the mountains of rules, but I did hear that worlds away has been replaced by a thing called Dreamscape.

Everything that is old is new again.

I was a compuserve member way back when the internet was hard to get onto (you couldn't access the net from compuserve when I first signed up). They looked deep into my soul and gave me a number based upon the order in which I joined. About when they let me choose a screen name for myself (all_the_good_names_are_taken@compuserve.com I kid you not.) they introduced this thing called Worlds Away which seems eerily like "there."

The keyword you typed at the go prompt was AWAY, so youd type GO: AWAY and be transported to a virtual world which had all the usuall compuserve anal retentive rules to keep everyone playing nice.

I've since left compuserve due to the cost of access and the mountains of rules, but I did hear that worlds away has been replaced by a thing called Dreamscape.

Everything that is old is new again.

• For years I have been vocal (and largely unrecognized) in my views that VRML was being handled wrongly.. aiming at technical specs rather than what users wanted and what environments to craft that would make it easy for ordinary folks to make 3D spaces. All those 3D modeling tools, however wonderful, will never appeal to a large content community or be able to be used by the ordinary netizen. In addition, and sharing your frustration, the fact that multi user was never treated as a priority was a big problem for VRML and potentially its fatal mistake. Building 3D is fundamentally a social activity (in the real world) and VRML desperately needed a multi user virtual commons where people could come in and kick the tires of new objects or properties, carrying out their development at the level of a real usable visual space. The VRML mailing list approach was a disaster and brought the level of discussion down from the experience of 3D to "text only" code talk and politics. The few multi user vrml spaces made were either not open to the community for development or were efforts too small to drive the development of VRML.

Of course, the reasons could have been basic things like it was slow and clunky. But the above opinions seem valid too.
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