What else is a MOO good for, besides playing games? What are the nonrecreational uses? Could a virtual office be a useful tool for effective telecommuting?
Predictor: Curtis, Pavel
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Howard Rheingold interviews researcher Pavel Curtis at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Rheingold writes: ”One PARC researcher, Pavel Curtis, is looking closely at MUDs, the water coolers of the Internet. He sees them as a way of bringing informal, even playful communication back into organizations. In MUDs, the ‘Multi-User Dungeons’ of the Internet, thousands of enthusiasts create their own dramatic adventures, sometimes vying for points in fantasy games, sometimes just conversing … Why not make a MUD programming tool kit that was also an example of another honored PARC tradition, an object-oriented language? From such a language comes MOO, or ‘MUD, Object-Oriented.’ Curtis built on the work of Steven White, a student at the University of Waterloo (Canada). In January 1991, he opened LambdaMOO. Hundreds of players flocked to it … Curtis … started thinking about bigger issues, like multimedia interfaces and whether the medium can be scaled up for millions of participants. ‘What else is a MOO good for, besides playing games? What are the nonrecreational uses? Could a virtual office be a useful tool for effective telecommuting?’ were the questions they started pursuing … He showed me how a multimedia MOO would work. Every space within the virtual world would be a place where people could display text, bulletin-board style. But people who were present in the same virtual room, no matter where they were in the physical world, could choose to be in audio and video contact. A researcher in one part of the building, or one part of the world, might encounter another researcher in one of the MOO’s ‘rooms.’ A simple command would make it possible for those researchers to see each other via video and talk with each other via audio connections built into their computer workstations. A collaboration space that mutated from role-playing games is a long way from copying machines, or even the electronic office, but it is easy to see Curtis’s work as part of a whole strategic vision of tapping people’s everyday innovations.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: MUDs/MOOs/B-Boards
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: PARC is Back! After Fumbling the Future, Xerox PARC is Back With a Visionary New Director, Bright Researchers and Amazing New Technology
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/parc_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney