I’ve been thinking for years that the underlying concept of MOOs/MUDs is better for virtual events than high bandwidth/low presence solutions like video conferencing (or its cousin VR). Wild seeing it implemented.
The challenge is that it inherently privileges people who thrive in a fast-paced text-based chat room style experience. That’s me, to a T, but those of us who teethed on that style of Internet need to remember who it implicitly leaves out of the conversations.
(To be clear, video events and in person events do the same with different and overlapping sets of people. I don’t think there’s any event platform that will free us if the the responsibility to ask who we’re missing)
That said, I saw a lot of companies I. The tech world struggling to make a “virtual booth experience” or “vendor hall experience” compelling. VR ain’t there yet, Zoom is terrible for it. This feels like something that could capture the difficult to reproduce spatial quality.
The first MOO I ever poked at was Snow, part of the Sensemedia network. It did lots of interesting experimental stuff — the MOO was also an http server and rooms/objects all got URLs, were all navigable.
It reminds me of research I did a few years back into the IA decisions inherent in museum exhibit design — spatial cues and physical layout as meaningful ways to communicate relationship etc, not just aesthetics. The IA of a place.
Quite a bit of web work assumes a kind of “neutral information space” — an abstract world where the content exists without referent. On the flip side there’s skeuomorphism and its push to make the digital directly resemble the physical.
It’d be interesting to think about web and digital interfaces that take a third path, working to give people meaningful and useful windows into the physicality of a real space — focusing on what that physicality communicates and affords, not just what it looks like.
This is where many lifelong book lovers find eBooks jarring. Digital readers and devices seem to deliver 1) words decoupled from the affordances inherent in the physical artifact of book-ness, or 2) slavish reproduction of the aesthetics (curled pages, red-ribbon bookmarks) etc
…While ignoring the specific useful operations physicality makes easy. (Leaving a finger where you’re reading, quickly flipping back or forward and returning to where you left off, for example. Or remembering where a passage appeared by the thickness of the already-read portion)