Guidelines for explorations/critiques of virtual worlds.

As you explore and experiment with the various avatar virtual worlds for this course, here are some issues to keep in mind, that I want you to explicitly address in your submitted critiques. You will doubtless find other important considerations; be sure to include those as well.

• Is this virtual space 2D, 2.5D, 3D? If 3D, is it VRML, VRMLish, or something else?
• What agenda, if any, do you feel the world designers were trying to incorporate into the world architecture? (I mean the team which created the enabling software, e.g. Traveler, not a specific world built with that software, e.g. Utopia.)
• How successful were they?
• What activities are facilitated?
• What would you like to do, but find difficult or impossible?
• Is this world conducive to community building? What affordances are there for such activities?
• How easy is it to communicate with others in this world? Syncronously? Asyncronously?
• Can you change the virtual environment? To what extent? Are your changes persistant, i.e. will they be there when you log in again?
• How easy is it to navigate? Are there mutiple modes for travel, e.g. walking/flying, teleporting, others?
• Is the interface logical and easy to use?
• Are there back channels for information about the world and/or the enabling software, such as web pages, mail lists, etc? Should such back channels be incorporated into the world?
• Are all entities in this world avatars, or are some of them bots? How useful are any bots?
• What is the experience of being embodied in avatar?
  • Are the avatars 2D, sprites, 3D? What kind of 3D-- VRML, VRMLish, or something else?
  • Is there a fixed set of avatars? If so can they be modified? How easily? How large is the number of basic models? How varied are the types of basic models?
  • Can you import an avatar? Build one from scratch, or from a kit?
  • What is your point of view (POV)? 1st person? 3rd? What kind(s) of 3rd? e.g can you see your own face?
  • What kinds of actions can your avatar perform? e.g. wave, dance, fight, etc.
  • Does your avatar have a set of emoticons it can put on? e.g. happy, angry, sad, etc.
  • Is there some method to authenticate each user? If not, is this a problem or a feature?
• What is special about this world?