The Future

If you've learned one thing during our travels through the online universe, it's
that there's something for everyone. After typing a few commands into your
computer, you're visiting strange lands and exploring new worlds. Add a few
keystrokes, and you're battling monsters, or partying with werewolves in
alternate universes on a MUD. Change a few of those commands and you're meeting
new friends and working to build a new universe on a MOO. The simple combination
of text, computers and the Internet has resulted in almost limitless worlds to
discover and explore.

But what's ahead for the world of online realities? Like all other aspects of
technology, no one is resting on their laurels when it comes to innovation. As
we've seen in our brief excursions into MUD and MOO history, much has changed
over the past few years, and the frenzy of development continues to build. Today,
we build worlds out of words, but tomorrow you can be sure that text-based worlds
will morph into graphical universes where people can meet, play and work online
in ways that we can only begin to imagine. 

Let's venture forth on the Net to the World Wide Web and look at several attempts
to meld the multimedia of the Web with the interactive possibilities of MOOs.
After that, we'll drop by LambdaMOO to see one way MOOs might become the virtual
libraries of tomorrow. Then we'll check out some of the first virtual conference
centers on the Internet and visit what may be the prototype of the university of
the future. Finally, we'll get a glimpse at how Hotwired magazine is using MOOs
to create online meeting places that readers can access from within the magazine.

As you can tell, there's some cool stuff happening.

When Worlds Collide: The World Wide Web Meets the World of MOO

One of the most interesting virtual world innovations has been the combination of
MOOs with the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web (the Web) is a global system
linking vast amounts of information. Through the combination of a universal
system for information transmission and powerful graphic front-end programs
called browsers, the Web allows ordinary people to access vast amounts of
information quickly and easily, without the steep learning curve that used to
slow budding infonauts. However, what's getting people really excited about the
Web is that it allows them to view graphics, text, sounds and even video over the
Net. By combining the telecommunications capabilities of the Net with the
powerful linkage technology of hypertext, the World Wide Web allows us to access
the online world with a click of the mouse. You'll remember that MOOs are
designed to be object-oriented environments. All the information that makes up a
MOO world is stored in a tightly organized database of "objects." Everything,
from the most generic blob to the most complex ībot, is stored in the MOO
database in a way that can easily be accessed and examined. 

This tightly organized structure makes MOOs ideal for experiments in linking
virtual worlds to the World Wide Web. Because MOO information is stored in an
easily accessible format, people have been able to develop several new ways to
get the Web to read and display MOO information. These systems allow you to log
onto a MOO though the Web and then use a simple system of pointing and clicking
to perform basic MOO functions. At this time, the Web is not sophisticated enough
to handle real-time two-way interaction, so all you can do is act like a ghost in
the MOO, flitting from place to place, examining objects and looking at people.

The Chiba City Sprawl

Looking back to your earlier visits to The Sprawl, you might remember several
references to URLs and the Web in the descriptions of the common areas. In fact,
you may have even visited the famous Webster's Bar and URL and wondered what all
that gibberish scrawled on the walls was. 

That barroom wall gibberish is URLs. On the Web, a site's URL (uniform resource
locator) functions as its World Wide Web address, telling your browser how and
where to retrieve a certain chunk of information. When you create a "page" on the
Web, its URL is its address. Using this address, people can then use their
browser to view your page.

So what does all this have to do with The Sprawl? After all, it's just a MOO and
doesn't really have anything to do with the World Wide Web, right? In fact, the
SprawlMOO is just half the package. Not only can you access The Sprawl through
telnet or a client program, but you can access it through the Web at
http://chiba.picosof.com:7777. There, you'll find The Sprawl home page, a Web
document packed with information about The Sprawl, its creators, a brief bit
about how the Web/MOO interface works and a link so that you can log onto the MOO
from within the Web. Figure 7-1 shows what you'll see when you arrive at The
Sprawl's WWW homepage.

First, connect to The Sprawl's WWW page by pointing your Web browser at
http://chiba.picosof.com:7777/. Once you arrive, follow the directions on the
screen to go to the page where you can log onto the MOO. If you skipped Chapter 5
and don't have a character on The Sprawl, that's fine--it'll allow you to log on
as a guest if you just want to poke around.

Once you log onto The Sprawl through the Web, the WOO (Web+MOO) Transaction
Protocol (developed at SenseMedia, the creator of The Sprawl) takes over,
transforming your World Wide Web actions into commands that the MOO can
understand. The WOO also renders the details of the MOO database into a form that
can be used from the World Wide Web. Figure 7-2 shows you what 100 Chiba Blvd.,
the entrance to The Sprawl, looks like from the WWW.

At first glance, it really doesn't look all that different from what you're used
to seeing on The Sprawl. Sure, the text may look prettier, but what you see
contains the same information you've seen before--the name of the room, the
description of what you see, a list of objects in the room and a list of people
hanging out. Perhaps the most obvious difference (besides the nice text and the
big graphic) is that some of what you see is underlined. If you've had any
experience walking the Web, you know that an underlined word is a link to another
part of the Web. Here, you'll notice that objects--people, exits and things--are
underlined. If you click an object, you'll bring up the text associated with it.
For example, if you click an exit, you'll go to the place that the exit connects
you to. If you click a person or a thing, you'll see a description of that person
or thing. 

You'll also notice some links along the bottom of the page: [help], [who],
[home], [urls]. Clicking these brings up more information--the help button gives
you help on using the MOO, the who button tells you who else is online and the
home button transports you to your home page. However, the most interesting
button is the urls button, because clicking this takes you to Webster's Bar and
URL. Here, people have created links to various places on the Web. Since you're
already on the Web, you can jump out to the rest of the world just by clicking
one of them. You can now access the entire world from within a MOO.

WAXWeb: MOO & Web as Collaborative Art

Even though The Sprawl's marriage of MOO and Web is an interesting experiment, it
only scratches the surface of what's possible when a powerful system for
distributing multimedia information is paired with an equally powerful way of
bringing people together in a virtual space. 

WAXWeb is one attempt at using the Web and a MOO to bring people together in a
totally new way. This new collaboration exploits the capabilities of each
technology to create an artwork that delights and defies description, but also
constantly grows and mutates. 

WAXWeb, located on the Web at http://bug.village.virginia.edu/, is an ongoing
hypermedia project based on filmmaker David Blair's film WAX, or the Discovery of
Television among the Bees. WAX was the first film to be transmitted across the
Internet over the MBone, a high-speed, high-capacity link that allows real-time
transmission of sound and video.

When you visit WAXWeb you have access to more than 1,500 stills from the movie,
500 video clips and 2,000 audio clips, all linked together though the World Wide
Web in a series of "hypernodes." Figure 7-4 shows you "Darkness," the first
hypernode on WAXWeb.

What's really innovative about WAXWeb is that it allows you to access its
companion WaxMOO. WaxMOO allows you to interact with other people visiting WAXWeb
and to use the programming capabilities of the MOO to add your own multimedia
information to WAXWeb. Through this combination of the hypermedia capabilities of
the Web and the interactive qualities of MOOs, WAXWeb has become a dynamic work
of art, constantly changing and always growing. Because the WaxMOO allows people
interested in the project to meet online, WAXWeb is perhaps the first work of art
that maintains an interactive online art forum. 

Cardiff WWW/MOO Server

After WAXWeb, you might be surprised at just how ordinary Cardiff University's
WWW/MOO server home page looks. Don't let the simplicity fool you--there's a lot
of stuff going on here. Located at
http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/User/Andrew.Wilson/CardiffMOO, the CardiffMOO home page
serves as the nexus for MOO-net, a worldwide network of MOOs that are
experimenting with World Wide Web interfaces. From here, you can jump off to Web
rooms at LambdaMOO, the MediaMOO, Diversity University and BlueMOOn. Also,
without leaving the World Wide Web, you can take a peek at who's online at any of
10 different MOOs from around the world.

This experiment is still in its beginning stages, something that you'll discover
if you have as many problems getting its links to work as I did. However, you can
get a good look at the future of WWW/MOO interfaces by going to Between
Worlds--CardiffMOO's home room on the Web.

Figure 7-6 shows you what you'll find when you arrive at Between Worlds. On the
surface, it resembles what we saw when we entered The Sprawl through the Web.
There's all the basic stuff--room name, description and lists of objects--but
you'll also notice that the movement links have been moved to their own section
near the bottom 

and that some links have been embedded in the description.

These links near the description are where things begin to really get
interesting. Unlike The Sprawl's links, most of these aren't just links to other
descriptions. Instead, CardiffMOO utilizes a unique system that embeds graphic
information within the MOO. Clicking the "Map of CardiffMOO" brings up an actual
graphic map of the MOO (Figure 77), which shows us where we are and where we can
go. Unfortunately, you can't go to any of the places on the map by clicking
them--you have to use the movement system for that. Even so, this ability to use
graphics for objects represents a big step for MOO/WWW combinations. Up this
point, MOOs couldn't use anything except text to describe objects within the MOO.
Now they can.

Hypertext Hotel: A Hypertext Work-in-Progress

We'll end our tour through the world of World Wide Web/MOO experiments by
stopping off at Hypertext Hotel. You can get there by pointing your WWW browser
at: http://duke.cs.brown.edu:8888/.

The Hypertext Hotel is a great example of how you don't need to use graphics to
create an interesting document on the Web, especially if you throw a MOO into the
mix. Hypertext Hotel is the current version of a work of hypertext fiction begun
by hyper-guru Robert Coover during his hypertext fiction seminar at Brown
University. 

First of all, you might be wondering what hypertext fiction is. We've already
seen that hypertext (and hypermedia) is a system for linking information in a way
that allows a reader to follow links to other information. It's easy to see how
this could be useful for associating a bunch of facts or following references in
a paper, but how can hypertext be used for writing fiction? Isn't fiction
supposed to be read from beginning to end? After all, everyone knows how peeking
at the end of a mystery novel ruins the whole story (even though we all do it
anyway!). How can a book that allows us to jump around within it work? Actually,
the anxiety you feel when confronted with a hypertext book is exactly the kind of
feeling that people writing hypertext fiction want you to feel. Hypertext fiction
is designed to shake up all your current perceptions about what a book should be
and make you look at fiction in a new way.

While all this may sound pretty heavy, the experience of jumping into the
Hypertext Hotel is as fun as it is unsettling. Each page is usually a brief but
lyrical description of a scene at this imaginary hotel, and you never know where
the links from that page are going to take you. Whether you find the experience
enlightening or disturbing probably rests as much on what links you take as it
does the text you read.

Other works of hypertext fiction exist on the Web, but what makes the Hypertext
Hotel so interesting (and relevant to our discussion of online worlds) is that
what you see on the Web is being generated from the HypertextHotel MOO. Just as
we've seen before, the Web pages are generated from the HypertextHotel MOO
database. Because Hypertext Hotel is combined with a MOO, you can log on and
create your own links and text in the story. Because you're on a MOO, you can
participate in online discussions about Hypertext Hotel and hypertext in general.
Just like WAXWeb, Hypertext Hotel combines WWW's linking capability with the
immediacy and collaboration of MOOs to create an ever-changing document and a
forest of forking paths.

Looking It Up Online

Not only are people using the World Wide Web to access MOO information, but now
people are using MOOs to access information from within MOOs themselves. The
Internet Gopher is a system of linked information servers that use menus to
provide access to tens of thousands of pages of information on just about
anything you can imagine. Because Gophers search and access information over the
Internet, and because Gopher systems are almost entirely text based, they're an
ideal partner for exploring information retrieval from within a MOO. 

Virtual Libraries

Larry Masinter of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Erik Ostrom of Gustavus
Adolphus College are information researchers who are using MOO technology to
develop libraries of the future. In their paper "Collaborative Information
Retrieval: Gopher From a MOO" they foresee a future where the Internet provides a
place for research and discussion. MOOs provide a perfect place for this, because
they already contain programming features that allow easy linkage to information
servers (Gophers) as well as facilities where people can interact. By bringing
people together in a MOO and allowing them to access information, Masinter and
Ostrom give us a look at what research might be like in the future.

Gopher in a MOO

Masinter and Ostrom have built a virtual library on Jays House MOO, a popular MOO
located at jayshouse.ccs.neu.edu 1709. Once you arrive at Jays House, you can
follow a simple set of commands to bring you to the Library, a room within the
MOO where you can use a "Gopher Slate" to look up information. 

The Gopher Slate is like a small, powerful computer that allows you to look up
information quickly and easily. Using commands such as look and pick, you can
examine the Gopher menus and move through them, accessing information by
"picking" it from a menu. Once you access information, it appears onscreen just
like anything else you might see on the MOO--you can even use special commands to
collect the information and mail it to yourself for later reading. It's even
possible for several people to look up information at once--a welcome feature for
people doing group research. The whole experience is a lot like meeting your
friends at the school library and doing research together, but with the added
ease of having massive amounts of information at your fingertips at all times. 

Perhaps, using technologies like the Gopher Slate, the virtual libraries of the
future won't be sterile "information retrieval centers" but places to read and
talk with other people from all over the world. In fact, it's not hard to imagine
a day where "meet me at the library" means "meet me on the MOO!"

Online Learning

If brainstorming with your friends at a virtual library without leaving your
house sounds exciting, then you'll probably do backflips when you hear that
someday it'll be possible to go to school, meet with friends and colleagues to
discuss your current research, and attend conferences online. Just imagine--no
more dragging yourself to the shower for that dreaded 8 a.m. class, no more
frantic travel to conferences, and no more worries about what you're going to
wear to school. Instead, you can show up as you are by turning on your computer,
typing a few commands and logging onto your favorite virtual schools, meeting
places and online conference centers. MOO technology makes it all possible.

Diversity University

Someday, all schools might look like Diversity University. Even though it's still
in its early stages of construction, DU already sports a well-stocked library, a
spacious student center, many classrooms and an inviting commons where you can
hang out and chat with fellow students. Better yet, there's no tuition and no one
cares if you show up to class in your underwear--Diversity University is located
entirely on a MOO.

Diversity University is associated with the Globewide Network Academy, an
organization dedicated to developing a fully accredited online university. Here,
you can attend classes and lectures with people from all over the world on
subjects from modern literature to biology. Classes are held in virtual
"classrooms" where students and teachers meet online. Also, Diversity University
has a well-stocked online library where you can go to read any of the hundreds of
reference works stored on DU or use its MOO-Gopher interface to look up
information from any of thousands of Gopher servers from around the world. When
you want to take a break, head to the commons or visit the student center, where
you'll be sure to meet fellow coeds.

Diversity University was created by Jeanne Butler McWhorter, a graduate student
at the University of Houston. She originally intended DU as a place where she
could meet other social workers to share ideas and research. However, as word
about her online meeting place spread across the Net, more people began to visit
Diversity University and it grew into something much more than an online social
worker clubhouse. If you want to be a part of this ongoing experiment in online
learning, telnet to moo.du.org 8888 or check out the Diversity University home
page on the World Wide Web, located at http://pass.wayne.edu/DU.html. Figure 7-10
shows what you'll find when you get there.

Virtual Conference Centers

Judging by the number of professional conferences held every year, it's clear
that people with similar professional interests love getting together. However,
time and university budgets usually put a limit on how often people from
different parts of the world can have meetings. For years, researchers have
relied on the Internet and the telephone as a way of staying in touch between
meetings, but e-mail and conference calls can't take the place of conferences.
Even though a conference call allows you to talk to several people at once, you
can't share a whole paper with other people over the phone. Conversely, e-mail is
a good way to transmit papers and other research materials, but it lacks the
spontaneity of actually being able to discuss things as a group.

MOOs change all that. Now, people can get together and share information no
matter where they are, and they can do it in the same spontaneous, interactive
way that they do when they are physically in the same place. Using a MOO, you can
hold a virtual "lecture" where everyone gets the chance to listen in and see the
entire text of the lecture scroll up their screens. After seeing the lecture,
virtual conference-goers can use the chatting capabilities of a MOO to discuss
the paper, regardless of where they are. Because of the capabilities that MOOs
offer for online research discussions, it should come as no surprise that there
are several "virtual conference centers" on the Net already.

BioMOO

BioMOO bills itself as "the biologists' virtual meeting place," a pretty apt
description of this online meeting space for biologists. Located at the Weizmann
Institute of Science in Israel (telnet to bioinformatics.weizman.ac.il 8888, if
you want to check it out), BioMOO is an online community of biological
researchers and a space for virtual conferences, meetings and roundtable
discussions. Additionally, BioMOO has its own World Wide Web space where people
can present conference posters. These documents utilize the technology of the Web
to include graphics from current research, links to other research and even sound
and video. If you want to see some of the posters that are being presented on
BioMOO, go to http://bioinformatics.weizmann.ac.il:70/1s/biomoo. Figure 7-11
shows the BioMOO home page. Figure 7-12 gives an example of an online research
poster.

BioMOO gives us a glimpse at the future of professional communication. Now,
rather than hopping on a plane to learn about current research at a conference,
you can use the Web to see what people are up to. And, because World Wide Web
pages can be updated in a matter of seconds, you can be sure that the research
you see is the very latest. After you've used the Web to take a tour around the
virtual conference center, you can jump over to the MOO to discuss the work
you've seen or meet with colleagues. If you're involved in biological research,
you'll probably be able to buy a few more petri dishes with the money you save by
meeting your peers on BioMOO.

PMC MOO

Scientists and computer researchers aren't the only ones using MOOs as virtual
conference centers--people in the humanities are starting to see the potential of
online, interactive communication. Probably the most well known humanities MOO is
PMC-MOO, an online community created and run by the people of the Postmodern
Culture electronic journal. PMC MOO is a virtual community of writers, students
and theorists using the MOO as a virtual conference center and meeting place.
There, they share current research papers, hold virtual symposia and gather
informally to discuss postmodern culture and the changing role of communication
in the information age. In fact, PMC MOO is a natural extension of the PMC
Journal, one of the first peer-reviewed electronic journals available over the
Internet. You can visit the PMC-MOO home page and journal archives on the World
Wide Web at: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/pmc-moo.html.

The PMC-MOO uses its facilities not only as a place to meet, but as a private
forum where people can discuss their research away from the everyday bustle of
their real lives. PMC-MOO has several MOO-only mailing lists and discussion
groups for swapping papers. It often holds online lectures and symposia. If you
want to drop by to visit, just telnet to pmcdemo@hero.village.virginia.edu. Log
on as guest and press Enter (or Return) when prompted for a password. From there,
follow the instructions to log on as a guest and examine the rest of the MOO.
Even if you don't consider yourself on the cutting edge of literary and cultural
theory, you're sure to find some interesting people and information on the
PMC-MOO.

Using MOOs to Teach Writing: ZooMOO

Finally, one of the most interesting ways that MOOs are being used takes
advantage of the nature of MOOs themselves. Since MOOs are text-based virtual
realities, they provide a great place for people to see how their writing affects
other people, because they can create actual worlds that people can enter and
interact with. Often, new writing students feel as if their work has no "meaning"
for anyone except themselves and their teachers. MOOs gives students the
opportunity to see how their words make a difference.

ZooMOO is a virtual world located at the University of Missouri and is the
brainchild of Joe Heck, Eric Crump (who, incidentally, edits a section of the
Hypertext Hotel called RhetNet) and Sally Foster, all faculty members at MU.
Designed as a cooperative project by the Learning Center, the Campus Writing
Program and the Campus Computing department at MU, ZooMOO looks like it's going
to be the first project of its kind to take students online and use the
capabilities of the MOO to help them become better writers. In addition, ZooMOO
sees itself as a place where students, faculty, administration and staff can meet
and share their professional experiences. ZooMOO isn't up and running yet, but
you can get more information about it from the Zoo MOO home page, located at
http://www.missouri.edu/~wleric/moo.html.

Graphical Interfaces

Virtual communities have been text-based so far, but the limited experiments that
have combined the World Wide Web with the world of MOOs have shown us a glimpse
of what can happen when we combine graphics with MOOs. However, not all MOO
graphics are on the Web--today people are looking at new ways to change
text-based online virtual realities into graphical worlds. At this point in the
development of the online world, the results are a long way from the hype we so
often see on TV about "virtual reality," but if we're going to look into the
future of online worlds, it's important to look at some of the first steps people
are taking to make graphic MUDs.

BSX-Graphical MUDding

Graphical MUDs have been around for a few years, but only with the availability
of relatively cheap high-speed modems have they begun to grow in popularity. The
grandfather of all graphical MUDs is BSX MUD at Lysator University. 

Figure 7-15 shows a scene from BSX MUD. It might not give many Nintendo games a
run for their money, but it does show how a little ingenuity can go a long way.
To access a BSX MUD you use a special client, which you can download from
ftp.lysator.liu.se in the pub/lpmud/bsx directory. Once you download the BSX
client (available for X-Windows, Amiga, Macintosh and MS-DOS machines), you use
it to connect to bsxmud.lysator.liu.se 7475. Once you've logged on, your BSX
client transforms special formatting codes transmitted by BSX MUD into pictures
like the one you see in Figure 7-15. 

You move around in BSX MUD by using the familiar LPMud commands. Moving,
searching and talking to other characters are handled the same way that you're
used to, but objects, people and places that you normally would just read about
are rendered into images by the client program. Using a BSX MUD is a little like
using a keyboard to control an illustrated storybook, turning the pages with
commands rather than your fingers. Soon, you stop paying attention to the
simplicity of the graphics. It's easy to get sucked into long sessions on BSX as
you wait to see what's around the next turn. 

Even though the graphics of BSX aren't going to win any special-effects awards,
the system presents some interesting possibilities for the MUDs of the future. As
modem speeds increase and the prices of sophisticated graphical computer systems
decrease, we're sure to see more MUDs with pictures. In fact, several commercial
services have begun to use similar (though more graphically sophisticated)
methods to create "gaming networks" where people can play games against each
other online. Networked, multi-player games are becoming a hot commodity with
computer entertainment people, because they're starting to realize that computers
just can't replace people as sophisticated opponents. Of course, as a member of
the online universe, you already know this--everyone else is just now catching up
to you.

Into the Future

If our explorations of the online universe and the future of virtual worlds have
taught us anything, it's that giving people the tools to shape their own reality
can yield some interesting results. MOOs, MUDs and other online worlds offer the
potential to bring people together to do things that have never been possible. In
the past, people have often looked at new technology as a "dehumanizing" force
that separated people, but perhaps the popularity of virtual worlds and online
communities rests on the fact that they bring people together.

What does the future hold? As more people come online, there's as much of a need
for increased access to people as there is for increased access to information.
The exponential growth in personal communication services (cellular phones and
pagers) shows us that. As our lives become more hectic and we spend more time
interacting with fax machines, talking car doors and voice mail systems from
hell, we'll look for more opportunities to talk to real people. It's uncertain
what form these new means of interaction will take, but we can look at Wired
Magazine's online publication, Hotwired, for a clue.

Hotwired arrived on the World Wide Web in November of 1994 as an attempt to make
us reexamine how we look at magazines. Not only is Hotwired an entirely new
publication, separate from its "physical" magazine counterpart, but it provides
ways of interacting that aren't possible with "physical" texts. When you read
Hotwired on the Web, you can follow links to information sources outside the
magazine, as well as links to information within the publication itself. Besides
having the opportunity to interact with Hotwired through the links, you can
become part of the editorial staff by suggesting your own links to and from
articles. And because it's interactive, Hotwired is different every time you
visit.

How does this apply to online communities? Hotwired's creators realized that its
readers were already a kind of "community" with shared interests in technology,
culture and the Internet. The question was how to provide a space where this
community of readers could meet. MOOs offered an answer.

Hotwired provides links to a meeting place called Cafe Wired on both LambdaMOO
and BayMOO. By clicking one of two links from within the magazine, readers find
themselves instantly transported to a virtual cafe populated with other readers.
Cafe Wired is more than a virtual hangout, though--it's a place where authors can
hold lectures about their work or have virtual book signings where they can chat
with readers. In effect, Hotwired has created an entirely new medium, one that
combines the depth of a magazine with the immediate interactivity of a virtual
community. Whether this new medium will take off as a new paradigm for
publications and online communication isn't certain, but what is certain is that
Hotwired gives us a glimpse of the future.

Moving On

The future of life online is bound to be exciting. Virtual worlds are being used
to bring people together in ways that have never before been possible, expanding
how we interact and promising nearly limitless new directions. We've touched upon
some new and innovative ways to use the technology of online worlds. Now it's
time to head out on your own virtual world adventures. Chapter 8 is an online
atlas and travel guide with directions to some of the best MUDs, MOOs and MUCKs.
Happy trails!