4.7.1 It is truly awe inspiring to survey how much progress industry has made in figuring out ways to cash in on the potential markets of the World Wide Web. Star-featured chat rooms sponsored by large companies, soap operas, online trading, and role-playing games seem to be the places where most success is promised-in other words, any space that could potentially form large communities that will regularly log on to communicate, exchange ideas, and spend cybercash.

4.7.2 Avatar-filled chat rooms seem to be where most entrepreneurs are placing their bets. By the year 2000, chats are expected to generate 7.9 billion hours of online use, with a resulting $1 billion in advertising revenue (New York Times, 1996). But makers of virtual environments predict that scrolling text for chat rooms will soon be replaced with 2-D and 3-D graphical environments, while marketers are busily exploring ways to exploit new technology for advertising.

4.7.3 For example, soap operas on the World Wide Web are seen as ideal environments for marketing strategies involving advertisements built into the narratives. [5] Moreover, in contrast to television, there are virtually no standards regulating web-based advertising. Currently, several cybersoaps allow advertisers the chance to have their products integrated into the story line (Advertising Age, 1996).

4.7.4 Of course none of these developments would be taking place with this kind of speed if the WWW was a text-only environment. Although text-based MOOs and MUDs are still very active communities and there will probably always be a place for them, the real gold-rush has started with the introduction of graphical user interfaces. Graphical Multi-User conversations ("GMUKs") are something of a cross between a MOO and a chat room or channel. Rather than limiting users to text-only communications, as in most virtual chat environments, GMUKs add an audio-visual dimension that creates the illusion of movement and space.

4.7.5 The most popular GMUK, to date, is Time-Warner's The Palace, a client/server program that creates a visual and spatial chat environment. [6] Currently, there are many Palace sites located across the Internet, varying widely in technical and artistic sophistication as well as graphical themes. Jim Bumgardner and Mark Jeffrey created and designed The Palace at Time Warner's Palace Group. The software driving the environment was released in November 1995. More than 300,000 client versions have been downloaded since then, and over 1,000 commercial and private-hosted Palace communities have been established. Major investors include Intel, Time Warner, Inc., and Softbank, and companies like Capitol Records, Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Television, Sony Pictures, MTV. (1996, Suller, http://www1.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber).

4.7.6 Time/Warner's "avs," as Palace members affectionately call them, fall into two overall categories. The first are the standard set of "smileys" that come with the Palace program. These faces are available to "newbies" that visit the Palace program, and are available to all users, including unregistered "guests." The standard avs are associated with newbies, the unregistered guests who are considered a lower class of the Palace population. They have not paid the registration fee, they do not belong to the Palace culture, and they are limited to wearing only the standard avs and props. They cannot create their own avatars and are reduced to wearing a smiley which identifies them as a newbie. Only after paying the registration fee can the user unlock the prop-creating/editing feature of the Palace software. At that point they are able to choose from Animal, Cartoon, Celebrity, Evil, Real, Idiosyncratic, Positional, Power, Seductive or "Other" avatars. The Palace is an excellent example of an environment in cyberspace that is a combination of an established entertainment industry's approach to pre-packaged programming for the public, reminiscent of developments such as Disneyland or any planned community. [top]