Dancing with the ghosts in the machine: virtual communities expand the concept of media and play.(Virtual Worlds)

Virtual worlds are coming of age, and they're getting real ... more real than ever.

During the past five years, there has been an explosion of sites that offer visitors to persistent worlds a wide range of activities, including playing games, having adventures, and meeting people. In almost all cases, the real attraction of 3D worlds is community--the chance to meet and interact with people in a virtual space. And, for many who visit 3D virtual communities such as Second Life, There.com, Entropia Universe, Active Worlds, and others, playing in virtual worlds is creatively fulfilling. People in virtual worlds can create an identity, clothing, buildings, and landscapes (see Editor's Note, pg. 2). As it turns out, the drive to create is every bit as compelling as the drive m blow things up--the standard fare in most computer games.

What's especially intriguing about this new wave of interest in virtual worlds is that 3D has the potential to become a mainstream capability--finally.

Obviously, 3D worlds are not new. They arrived with browsers and the Internet, and interest reached near-hysterical levels in the early 1990s, during which time enthusiasts asked, why have 2D browsers that mimicked printed pages when we could have 3D browsers to wander around in? As so often happens, the answer has been a long time in coming, and it's short and sweet: Why not?

LucasFilm's Habitat is often considered the first virtual world to use avatars, though they were 2D. The site gave people "an apartment" and served primarily as an animated chat. Habitat started in 1985 at a time when most people didn't have computers that could even run it, or Internet connections fast enough to make the process anything less than painful. The spirit of Habitat lives on in Habbo Hotel, which also offers denizens their own living space to use as a base.

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One of the longest running 3D environments is Active Worlds, started by Robin Britvich as WebWorld in 1994 which he ran on the Peregrine Systems servers "after hours." The project flew under various company flags, and the site was renamed AlphaWorld and, eventually, Active Worlds, its current moniker. It was kept alive by the stubborn persistence of developers who built and maintained a variety of worlds. By the late-1990s, several other companies emerged and got a running start in this arena, including There, founded by Will Harvey and Jeffrey Ventrella.