What is your opinion of AWGate?

I won't be doing a long post tonight, but I just wanted to stop in and get some opinions on AWGate for my next one. :)

Overview of AWGate as it exists today; a central hub in a futuristic city

This is prompted by a pretty good discussion we had Sunday at the Town Hall Meeting; I'm not sure that a consensus was reached as far as the opinion, but a lot of suggestions were offered as to what could be done to improve it, including things that we do and don't have the authority to do.  The discussion touched on pretty much everything you could expect, from the built form of the world to how people actually interact with one another.

I'd like to further explore the built environment and the interpersonal interaction, as I feel those are two pretty big factors in the success or failure of the Gate.  How about you guys?

What do you think is important?

Let me know.  You can do so here, or by visiting the forum blogs page and keeping up with us there.  Whichever medium is more comfortable for you.

Later!

From 3D to 2D: How do you express a 3D product in a 2D browser?

How do you express a 3D product in a 2D browser?  I raised this concern during the flamefest regarding the update to activeworlds.com a while back, and I don't think the question has ever been resolved.

Supposing that the best place to begin is experience, perhaps we can look to how we learned in the browser.  We all know what Active Worlds is; how to use it, where to go to find people... its various nuances that we like or dislike.  Learning about that took some time -- even though I was hooked on my first day.  Building certainly took a while to understand, even if my first attempts were pretty awful.  (BTW, I know those coordinates in my memory even after all these years!) Despite a rough beginning, I did manage to learn about correctly spacing objects and I had a great time doing it!  From my first build I went on to create my first town, and as I began interacting and collaborating with other users, very early on I understood that we all had a different level of competency with the technology, and looking back on that now perhaps that has to do with how we came to experience Active Worlds and virtual technology in general. One guy came in right from AWGate.  I came to build after getting some help in AWNewbie.  A few days later I brought in a friend from class and taught him myself!  Back in 2002, there were plenty of ways for new users to learn and understand Active Worlds.

Today, this is still true.  Perhaps not to the magnitude, but AWGate is much more educational than it has been in the past, and AWSchool is more active than I've ever known it to be.  AWNewbie has seen better days, but the framework is still there and generally, if a new user wants to learn, well, they'll have plenty of options.  This is all well and good for the ones who have made it as far as AWGate, but I think our focus needs to move even further out.  Out beyond our universe -- to the 2D web browsers that are the bread and butter of the typical internet user's experience.  What does Active Worlds look like... to them?
 

Busy Day! In the meantime...

Hey everyone!  I won't be able to get a full-fledged post up for tonight but I do have enough time to drop a small blurb in and offer you some thoughts about tomorrow's post!  I want to start discussing how to really do justice to a 3D project in a 2D presentation environment (i.e. Active Worlds on a web page).  How do you do that!?   I've got a few ideas, but as far as presentation mediums go, I think people have found a very good start in utilizing video.  Below you'll see a great example: SW Chris' Active Worlds Exploration Demo.

If you don't know Chris very well he's really great with video and puts a lot of consideration into his projects; I think his video is a good case study for the "do's and dont's" of discussing the Active Worlds Browser in this medium and we'll talk a bit more about that tomorrow.

In the meantime... what do you think?  Does video do AW justice outside of our little universe, and do you know of any other good examples where it does?  Feel free to share! :)

A Closer Look at Advertising: What should activeworlds.com represent?

For all of the points I hit on yesterday concerning advertising, it completely slipped my mind to mention the recent changes to activeworlds.com -- the first impression of Active Worlds to most new users.  After years of a stagnant and static front page, activeworlds.com finally received a face lift several weeks ago. Surely the community would be esctatic!  An update, finally!  Well, it certainly got a lot of feedback... most of it was pretty negative.  For the forum community, at least, no failure was too minimal to drag out and beat to death... and then some. There are spots to improve on, certainly, but yeesh! I'm still not sure who is responsible for the updates, but I'll take this time to commend them for continuing to apply minor tweaks since the initial update.  The flaming forum barrage surely would have driven off a lesser person.

At any rate, I'm not going to use this as a sounding board to pass judgment on the site as is -- I think we've covered that well enough.  Rather, I'm more interested in the potential of what Active Worlds' homepage should be; what it should do, and what it should represent.