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interesting, they have a dedicated Patent page
http://www.worlds.com/patentinformation.html

Their page shows a first patent on:
April 17, 2001
http://www.worlds.com/text/PatentNo1_6219045.pdf

interesting, they have a dedicated Patent page
http://www.worlds.com/patentinformation.html

Their page shows a first patent on:
April 17, 2001
http://www.worlds.com/text/PatentNo1_6219045.pdf

http://www.worlds.com/

It's mostly empty now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqel0k0NzNU has a short walk around of something before Second Life came around, and that still runs well on 56k.

I worked for http://worlds.com/ back in the mid 1990s (remember the billboards in S.F. and other major cities? What a freekin' JOKE), and we had the basic technology to do this back then. The system included a world builder as part of the product, although it needed at least another year of work to become a real product. The backend also allowed for this, you could link to other servers on different machines. Users of Worlds have been hacking on it to create their own worlds for years (the server really only tracks your location -- the textures and such are served up from HTTP servers, so once you get the server to a location that YOU have created, you can just distribute your world to your friends and serve up the textures). The problem was that the management at the time blew their entire wad on marketing (see above) and other follies, rather in focusing on anything that might be of USE! It was truely frustrating.

I am impressed by the tenacity of the current president -- Worlds.com has gone broke twice and is STILL hanging on and appears to be planning something for this fall (what it is, I have no idea -- I haven't worked there for over six years).

But it is patented

You would not want the Worlds.com Legal team after you, correct?

I especially like this sentence from their April 17 2001 10KSB SEC form:

"Our auditors have expressed doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern."

Bwahahahahahahaaaa!

This explaines why their stock is currently trading at 9 cents.

Of course all this raises the spectre of someone else buying their 'IP' and persuing everyone under the sun, shaking them down for the 'cheap settlements out of court'...

What computers really need right now is a DWIM (Do What I Mean) interface.
AI isn't up to the job yet. DWIM was originally a feature in Interlisp, and Gosling claimed that although DWIM sometimes did the wrong thing, it never did anything bad (i.e. non-undoable.) One day I typed "EDIT" when in a mode where EDIT wasn't meaningful, and DWIM spell-corrected it to "EXIT", throwing me out of Interlisp and losing the workspace. That's the trouble with letting a DWIM system actually do anything. Probably today's closest equivalent of DWIM is Ask Jeeves, which is notorious for doing the wrong thing, but which operates in a context where doing the wrong thing doesn't cause harm.

In other words, you should be able to communicate with your computer in some way that makes sense to you, and it should translate your request into something that makes sense for it.
Not good enough. The computer has to have a sense of the consequences of its actions before it can be allowed to act on its own. This is one of the major problems in computing today. Go think about that problem for a while in the context, say, of system administration.

3d interface
Have you ever tried to get anything done inside a gloves-and-goggles VR system? I've tried six of them, starting with Jaron Lanier's original one, and they all suck. It's like trying to build something while wearing mittens. Autodesk played around with VR early on, thinking that it would be the next generation in CAD. It wasn't. An early goal was to get to something comparable to an Erector set in VR, and that's still out of reach. Even high-end 3D animation is almost invariably done with three planar views and one 3D view on-screen. Even though the better animation systems let you draw in the 3D window, few animators do.

If you think online navigation by moving around in a big 3D world would be a great idea, check out Worlds.com, which has such a world. Works OK, but the experience sucks. Moving your avatar around a big 3D space turns out to be a lousy way to shop, let alone look up information.