OT: Lite stuff _ ActiveWorlds Lets You Play God
by Tom Spring, PCWorld.com
As waves slosh gently against the wharf's pilings, a pair of busty beauties mill about looking bored rigid. Suddenly a slightly menacing version of the cartoon character Dilbert appears and breaks into a disturbing rendition of the Macarena. On the horizon, a bloated orange sun hangs low against a deep-blue electronic skyline.
This is not my nightmare: My dream world is virtual.
Avatars tour virtual Centropolis.
The reality is that I'm at my PC linked to ActiveWorlds.com, (http://www.activeworlds.com) a three-dimensional environment filled with beaches, music, chat, and dozens of loitering "avatars." The word avatar is taken from Hindu mythology and is the name given to a god that has taken a life form on earth. Online, an avatar is a character that represents you.
ActiveWorlds offers your avatar nearly a hundred "worlds" through its downloadable viewer. The free program lets you travel digital mockups of the planet Mars, Yellowstone National Park, and many more fantasy worlds built by ActiveWorlds' users.
"There is another world out there most people don't know about," says Rick Noll, president and chief executive officer of ActiveWorlds.com. He believes today's rudimentary 3D worlds will proliferate and transform passive entertainment into rich interactive experiences. Instead of watching actors on a television soap opera, he says, you could someday be a character in a virtual drama.
ActiveWorlds is one of a handful of online universes that let you interact and chat with others via an avatar--a graphical icon that represents a person in a virtual environment. What sets ActiveWorlds apart from competitors such as Blaxunn Interactive and Worlds.com is that users can play God and create worlds of their own, fashioning them to their personal tastes.
Virtual Community, Real Challenges
Virtual worlds have a checkered history. Ventures by OnLive Traveler and OZ Interactive, among others, have struggled to translate 3D worlds and avatars into profits, analysts say. Lack of bandwidth and sufficient processing power have posed significant barriers to 3D's growth online. But that's slowly changing.
And even with today's limitations, some communities have fared better. Worlds.com has thrived by catering to special interest groups with creations such as David Bowie World, Hanson World, and New York Yankee World. In each of these, your avatar interacts with those of other fans--and purchases merchandise in virtual stores.
Still, "most of these companies have failed to come up with viable business models," Noll says.
Five-year-old ActiveWorlds currently has 35,000 customers who have coughed up $20 yearly for "citizenship." Roughly a million more have signed on as free limited-access members.
That's nothing compared to the 100 million-plus souls who rely solely on text-based chat to communicate online. By comparison, at any given time a scant 500 avatars are online at ActiveWorlds, and only about 10 percent are paying customers, Noll says.
"Things like instant messaging seem to be pretty compelling," says Dan O'Brien, analyst with Forrester Research. "Why people need an avatar is not that apparent."
Noll retorts that text-based chat is to 3D worlds as the horse and buggy is to a jet airplane.
"Our biggest challenge is changing public perceptions," Noll says. Consumer interest might be piqued as 3D technology is popularized by Hollywood and a growing number of Web sites.
Virtual communities also face built-in technology limitations. Because most people have relatively slow Internet connections, graphically rich environments can sometimes take several minutes to load. ActiveWorlds has addressed some bandwidth issues by developing a proprietary technology that displays only portions of any given world.
Making Real Money From Virtual Reality
ActiveWorlds makes some additional money by selling virtual real estate to users: For $69 yearly you can own your own world. But more typically, ActiveWorlds cuts deals with businesses that license the company's software to host and build their own universes.
Think: Mall of America in cyberspace. ActiveWorlds recently inked a deal with an Australian mall management firm, 3D Global, to build the mother of all online malls. When completed in November, it will be filled with name-brand merchandise, electronic-commerce shopping carts, and customer service representatives.
ActiveWorlds has also worked with Sony Pictures Entertainment to build a replica of 1937 Los Angeles--complete with characters, cars, and music--for the movie The Thirteenth Floor.
The University of California at Santa Cruz virtually cloned its campus in a custom world to give potential students the capability to preview the campus online.
Other customers, including information technology portal EarthWeb.com, hired ActiveWorlds to build and run a series of virtual trade shows last fall.
Navigating Cyberspace
You use both a mouse and keyboard to navigate ActiveWorlds. You can fly, jump, dance, and even swim by selecting from a library of actions. Each world has its own themed avatars: Choose Atlantis, and you can become the Surfdude or a shark that prowls the ocean deep. Interacting with others still requires pounding out messages on your keyboard. As in most chat rooms, your message appears in a scrolling chat window.
More complicated endeavors, such as building a house complete with a landscaped lawn, requires more expertise. For example, you must wander through ActiveWorlds to find the house you want, and copy and paste it onto your own plot of real estate. That goes for chairs, bookshelves, and everything else in your home, all the way down to Fido.
You can add avatars that meet and greet visitors and that can answer basic questions. More advanced avatars can be programmed to search the Web when you question them.
Avatar Envy
Perhaps the most powerful thing about a 3D world is its capability to draw people in, analyst O'Brien says. But the delayed arrival of mainstream broadband has tempered enthusiasm for 3D technology, he says.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate Hannes Vilhjalmsson, who studies avatars, says 3D worlds and avatars have barely emerged from the primordial soup of ones and zeros. In time, avatars will be able to mimic human behaviors such as eye glances and spontaneous conversational gesturing.
Then, perhaps, Dilbert won't look quite so menacing when he does the Macarena on the boardwalk.
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