Thoughts about virtual people

I’ve just started to check the possible Metaverse environments of nowadays.
Being Second Life the hype I started looking for alternatives and bumped with There. Right from its front page I can see some really nice advantages.

The rendering of the world is different, well made, a bit of comic style which I think it’s great so we don’t always need a recent graphics card. That way it’s possible to have a large number of client types for several operating systems, devices and many internet access technologies. This is an advantage! I which…

Unfortunately checking the System Requirements made me delay the experience. It only works for Windows 98 and up, you must have a hardware accelerated graphics card.

Although all these arguments just collapsed the idea of a Metaverse candidate, I’m pleased to see they support 56k dial up connections – have to check that. However it can mean they don’t do much media or world stream. But then again Quakeworld worked quite well over dial up modems and old computers. Ok, I’m looking for something better than Quake, but you get the idea. The world should be accessible by low end computers even if you get less rendering and even less colours. In Quakeworld I could play even if I had a 320×200 screen and not seeing much definition, against 800×600 adversaries that almost could aim to my body parts. I never won many times it’s a fact, but I could play and interact with the world and the other users.

There are several more topics of such an environment should have, but I’ll leave it to another time.

Let’s then download the windows client and meanwhile create my avatar.

What ? I can’t create an avatar ? I’m not using Internet Explorer and I can only create one with it ? WHY ?

I though that There, having a former Ebay architect as a CEO, was capable of attracting everyone and not entered in this naïf argument “I just work with IE”. It recalls me of the child in the playground that takes his ball away because he’s loosing the game.

Well… Let’s reboot and test the evil forces.

[Update: There is closed]