I spent today exploring a 3D chat based program called Worlds.com . Established in 1994, Worlds is a place for users to come and chat with one another in a virtual environment largely of their own making. At its height, hundreds of people would interact and chat with one another in environments that ran from simplistic to surreal.
Comparisons to Second Life are almost unavoidable, but it’s important to note that Worlds had existed for nearly a decade before Second Life was founded. This puts Worlds in a technological realm prior to Second Life, where the tools available were not quite as robust but the results were still unique. Many environments seemingly embrace and enjoy early limitations of 3d spaces, mostly rendering and fidelity limits.
However, not many users still remain. I was fortunate enough to have joined during a ‘trivia day’, where users would come in from their disparate worlds to play a game of trivia in the new-user area. I met many long-time users there as well as one man, whose conversation I’ll share today. As we stood on a beach made for virtual weddings he talked about his life, interests, and fears. I was honored to be there to hear them and I feel compelled to share some of that with you.
If you’d like to join me in exploring this, just send me a message on facebook, I’m Robert Lorayn. I look forward to seeing you there.
7 Comments
Highest appreciation.
nice.
this is great practice im/perfect. machines help us fly.
touching/interesting read. leaves me wanting to know more about ‘Worlds’
http://www.computerscult.org/cult/?attachment_id=1974 ;_;
I go there as muttonchop. It’s really fun to explore/have skinless kangaroo orgies with the regulars.
Hi, I used to use this back in 2000. In the UK, worlds chat came bundled on an ISP cd with a few other bits and bobs. The CD was free from and ISP called Freeserve which is no longer around. This is what got a lot of the UK users into worlds.
At the time, I thought it was totally amazing and I met a lot of people on there, all of whom have fallen by the wayside since, as is the case with most internet friendships. The most exciting thing for me was the avatar string. Once you became a VIP, you could use articulated avatars and with this came the ability to ‘hack’ the avatar string to combine bits of different avatars, resize them and create some weird and wonderful things! There were a lot of websites set up to explain how to do it, and even more that showed pictures of users creations. Most of the sites were hosted on Homestead.com until it decided to abandon free hosting, them those users went over to geocities, which itself decided to abandon free hosting about 3 years ago. However by that time, most of the sites had been abandoned and not updated for years. So with the end of Geocities went a large chunk of worlds.com history.
D7