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Comment by matheusd | Hacker News Reader

In the late 90's there was also Active Worlds[1][2]. It was one of the first online communities I frequented.

It seemed to follow exactly the path second life went, except with the diminished number of people that were on the internet at the time: very high initial interested (the "wow - 3d internet factor") and very little engagement after that.

I really thought 3d web would be a thing. :)

[1] http://activeworlds.com

[2] https://osantana.me/vintage/borolandia/artigo03/index.html (article in portuguese, pics of a brazilian AW server back from 2000)

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Active Worlds was the coolest thing I ever goofed around in, at least at the time. The COFMeta (metaverse) and Mars worlds were my favorite.

It was basically the 3D equivalent of Geocities. You could wander for hours, looking at the cool little houses and weird displays people had built. You could even do simple scripting with keyframes for animating objects by toggling their visibility. :)

It was so cool, and I even ended up buying a little AWLD stock. The market imploded of course, and the people running it apparently did some scummy things (see Shamus Young's accounting here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13720 ).

The only thing really missing was modeling; to solve this, you'd run across giant prefab yards, and then write down model names. Mars had a sort of boneyard for this purpose.

They also did kinda-cool tie-ins with other media, like a world for The 13th Floor and the X-Files movie. I miss that sense of "Oh man, this is the future!".

I had joined Active Worlds back when it was called AlphaWorlds[1] and before that I enjoyed Worlds Chat[2]. It was an interesting universe to explore. I didn't build much since their library of pre-made objects didn't have enough variety and you saw the same objects everywhere. You could model your own objects but I had trouble finding free software I could use for that. I hadn't logged in to Active/AlphaWorlds for a while and when I came back to see how things had changed they started charging for accounts. I had forgotten my login info and I wasn't willing to pay for a new account, so that was the end of that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_chat

The moment I read this article, I thought about ActiveWorlds again. I was never a paying citizen, but I used to visit a fair bit, a long time ago. They had so many different worlds and projects people did through it, I was surprised nobody mainstream ever gave it attention.

Perhaps once VR goes fully retail we'll see world creators like this become popular.

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