VISION / April 14, 1997

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by Linda Stone

When the telephone was first introduced in the 1800s, its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, imagined that it would be used for broadcast. As an 1876 internal Western Union memo noted, "This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." In those days, people obviously hadn’t conceived of call forwarding, call waiting, cell phones, Caller ID, 800 and 900 numbers, faxes or pagers - all the technologies that have turned the telephone into a communications device. Over the years, telephone technology has become ubiquitous in many countries, and today telephones are indeed an important, even essential social medium. (Just ask any teenager!) Today people in the United States make more than 725 billion phone calls a year.

Much like in the early days of the telephone, many people currently imagine that the most interesting opportunities on the Internet involve providing information or data – what is commonly referred to as "content." Although delivering content remains an extremely important function of the Internet - especially highly valued, timely content such as up-to-date sports scores, financial information, traffic maps, and news-providing information is not the only game in town.

Just as was true with the telephone, the Internet is a person-to-person communication medium. But whereas this transformation took decades to evolve with the telephone, it is already beginning to take off on the Internet. We are already seeing content and communication mixed and offered in a way that provides a context - enables it to be meaningful and useful - while promoting the development of communities of people with shared interests and needs.

There are social trends pushing us in this direction as well. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes many of these trends in his book The Great Good Place (Marlowe & Company). Communities based on geography are breaking down; places of worship, schools, cafes, pubs, and corner stores have disappeared in many places. People now drive many miles to work, to day care, to school, to shop, and to places of worship. Generic-feeling and impersonal chain stores have supplanted neighborhood hangouts and shops. Employees don’t know their patrons and vice versa. It’s a far cry from the café owner or the corner store proprietor who knew you, your family, and your buying and eating habits.

In addition, there is a growing sense of isolation in many places. In many communities, people don't feel safe going out. They often live far away from friends and family. People tend to focus their social lives at home.

Finally, technologies that have developed over the years have contributed to a "cult of efficiency." It’s possible now to get more done, work from just about anywhere, and be in almost instant communication with people all over the world. Larry Keeley, president of the Chicago-based Doblin Group, a consulting group owned by Perot Systems, believes that while technologies bring us closer to those who are geographically distant, they also take us further away from those who are physically close. Just think of the times you’ve been engaged in pleasant conversation with a friend, colleague, or family member. Then the phone rings or your pager beeps. What happens to your conversation?

But we still need to make contact in some way. We find ways for the technology to serve this drive to connect. Telephones currently serve this need. During the last decade, television and radio talk shows have become increasingly popular. On these shows, people are willing to open up and talk about intimate details of their lives, and many people seem interested, both to participate and to watch, either identifying with their lives and their problems or simply observing them.

The Internet, increasingly, will support this need to connect as well. E-mail, Usenet newsgroups, BBSs, chat rooms, teleconferencing, and "virtual worlds" (multi-user social venues with persistence and context) are some of the ways the Internet currently encourages social interaction and person-to-person communication. Many people complain about these activities, claiming that the content is of poor quality. Although this is often the case, the same is frequently true of face-to-face conversation. How many of your in-person or telephone conversations would you be willing to record and listen to again and again? Sure, there will be some gems, some wonderful moments, but there are also a lot of time wasters. The truth is that communication often involves a lot of boring content, no matter what the medium is.

Whether or not you consider much of this online interaction to be useless and simply "noise," the fact remains that people are increasingly using the Internet as a social medium. So in Microsoft Research, those of us in the Virtual Worlds Group are blending technology, sociology, and design to create multimedia, multi-user social technologies. We struggle with the tension between what makes great multimedia - such as cool 3-D - and what enables social interaction and a sense of community, such as the ability to form inclusive or exclusive clubs and groups. We work with graphics designers and user-interface researchers to introduce the latest technologies, and collaborate with cartoon artists, illustrators, and character animators.

The Virtual Worlds Group has released two products to date: Microsoft Chat (formerly called Comic Chat) and Microsoft V-Chat. Both products started out as experiments. We attempted to use audio, animation, and graphics to provide additional context and mood, as well as avatars that could gesture to add emotional realism. There are also tools and templates to enable easy creation of environments.

In Microsoft V-Chat, participants select characters or avatars to represent them, then meet, chat with each other, and explore 2-D and 3-D spaces. (It is easy to create your own V-Chat avatar – there are a wide variety of avatars to choose from – and thousands of people have done this.) Hot links in V-Chat environments connect participants to other parts of a Web site or other Web sites. There were more than 50 unique V-Chat spaces on the first version of the Microsoft Network (MSN). V-Chat was recently ported to the Internet, and new spaces are being posted regularly.

Microsoft V-Chat preceded and inspired the development of Microsoft Chat. In the latter, people can choose either text-based chat or comic-chat mode. In comic mode, participants choose comic characters to represent themselves. Comic-book-like frames are generated on the fly as the characters converse. Special algorithms (essentially a set of instructions the computer can follow) handle placement of characters in each panel. Gestures are either manually chosen or automatically generated by the words used. Hosting and administrative features, directory services, and a feature to easily start up your own room – all support user-generated and user-maintained communities. The cartoon user interface and clever algorithm to generate a "comic book" automatically were invented by David Kurlander, a user-interface researcher, working cooperatively with Jim Woodring, a well-known cartoon artist.

The Virtual Worlds Group believes that many Web developers and designers will want to use these products to create chat lobbies or gathering places on their sites, where they can host events and post links – links that take people to new information, either on that particular site or on others. V-Chat lobbies can help aggregate the community of people who peruse a Web site and can be used to highlight and connect them to what’s new and interesting.

As mentioned before, thousands of V-Chat custom avatars have been created. As we see how excited people are about creating their own avatars, it becomes clear to us that these avatars are viewed by their creators as "virtual selves" – graphical representations through which they experience cyberspace relationships. People express themselves through their avatars and others come to know them through these online representations.

For the past 20 years, the personal computer has primarily been a prosthetic for information and productivity. Now that computers are connected to the Internet, they are also prosthetics of being and interaction, They are vehicles through which we earn status and develop our reputation, through which we express what Carl Jung referred to as individuation (our need to be unique) and integration (our need to be part of a community).

The Virtual Worlds Group is continuing to experiment with technologies that support the use of the Internet as a social medium. This area is in a nascent phase, and we still face a steep learning curve. Our next-generation experiments and products go beyond chat – we are developing virtual world products with "persistence," worlds that support a sense of history or a memory of what people build, share, and exchange. Ultimately, developers will be able to use our technology to integrate these social virtual worlds with other activities on the Internet, like information delivery, commerce, and entertainment – in ways that will enhance a feeling of community.

Glossary for Virtual Worlds

Persistence: In virtual-world terms, this means that history, as it relates to objects, environments, and avatars, can be tracked. For example, if community members build homes in a virtual world, those homes will be there each time they log on. If a visitor tacks a note to the front door of a home when the owner is not there, the visitor’s note will be there when the owner gets home.

Context: Environment containing enough clues to make the content both meaningful and useful.

Avatar: Originally "the incarnation of a deity in human form," on the Web this has come to mean an online graphical representation of a person or personality.

Prosthetic: Originally meaning "an artificial device to replace a missing part of the body," this has come to mean an artificial addition or supplement to the five senses, something that extends human capabilities.