On-line Communities and the Next Generation Internet March 27, 1997 Peter Selfridge, Gregg Vesonder, Vijay Saraswat, Thomas Kirk, Dave Kormann, and Jon Wright * Information Systems and Services Research Center AT&T Labs - Research 180 Park Avenue Florham Park, NJ 07932 (email contact: first author at: pgs@research.att.com) Summary One of the biggest potentials of Internet technology is that it can enable dynamic, interactive, on-line communities. These communities, in turn, can catalyze, direct and humanize a wide variety of application areas, including scientific research, lifelong education, and the sense of empowerment, information access, and fulfillment throughout United States society. This white paper discusses on-line communities as they have emerged to date, their likely evolution in the near future, and the technological challenges that must be addressed before they reach their full potential. Introduction By now, the meteoric rise of the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW) is old news. With hundreds of thousands of sites and millions of users, the WWW has tremendous potential for revolutionizing communications, the distribution of information, and electronic commerce, and enabling new kinds of interactive applications. This paper first discusses emerging on-line communities and their evolution towards the incorporation of 3D. We then examine some of the challenges and opportunities to the success of on-line communities in the future. Finally, we conclude with what we see as some of the potential for on-line communities to further enable such applications as browsing, commerce, science, and distance and lifelong education The Evolution of On-line Communities The notion of an on-line or electronic community is a subtle one: most definitions of "community" include the notion individuals grouped together geographically [1] . Indeed, the point of an on-line community is to use the electronic on-line medium to make geographical boundaries irrelevant. As a medium, the Internet is unique: it provides a mechanism of communication that knows no geographical boundary, is (currently) of extremely low-cost, and also can provide persistence and history of interaction over time. When the Internet became widely available to Computer Science Departments in the mid to late '70s, it rapidly became clear that electronic mail (email) was its most dramatic contribution. Email was a new form of communication: reliable, fast but not instantaneous, it enabled thoughtful, relatively fast dialog that could be carried on at your desk without major interruption of your work. These dialogs could go on for many hours, could include (basically as attachments) any other form of on-line documents, and email history could be saved as a history of the interaction. This communication medium is still remarkably effective. The emergence of newsgroups marked a new stage in electronic communication. Rather than being restricted to individuals you already know, a newsgroup provides on-going, persistent, topic- oriented discussion that anyone can participate in. If a community is "open" and reflects common but evolving interests, then a newsgroup is a community. Furthermore, another characteristics of what we think of as a community emerged here: that of different roles for different individuals. These roles typically reflect different levels of participation. In a typical newsgroup, there are minor, occasional participants ("dabblers") as well as acknowledged "gurus", people whose level of participation affords them special status and some social power. Finally, like a non-electronic community, newsgroup communities splinter, converge, and otherwise evolve. There are newgroups on tens of thousands of topics and they remain hugely popular. The next stage in the evolution of on-line communities are chat groups. Chat groups come in many varieties but share the primary characteristic of immediate transmission of a participants typed message to the group. This results in on-going dialog between people that has a number of interesting characteristics. First, and a big contributor to their popularity, is the fact individuals can be anonymous. Second, because the communication is textual, a temporal history of the conversation is kept; this allows new participants to quickly come up-to-date on the current discussion. Finally, through the use of dedicated chat servers and chat services associated with on-line service providers (like AOL), an individual's personality can be persistent, allowing the kind of role differentiation that newsgroups provide. A new kind of chat group soon evolved called MUDs (for Multi-User Dungeons (or Dimensions)). Unlike chat, however, they also include a virtual geography and can allow users to extend the geography by adding rooms and objects programmatically. This ability to extend the environment with shared objects, behaviors, etc. adds a new dimension of interaction to the community, and also provides focuses for community contention and dispute. MOOs (MUD - Object Oriented) emphasize the easy programming of these new objects and more efficient storage and dissemination of shared state among many (hundreds if not thousands) of participants. MUDs and MOOs are perceived by many to have significant educational potential and a number of serious experiments are being run in this regard, including one at AT&T Labs - Research [2]. MUDs and MOOs are also the subject of serious sociological study, where they are seen as evolving communities in their own right [3]. The final, and in some ways most interesting, state in the evolution of on-line communities is the addition of 3D virtual spaces. Participants are represented by an "avatar" and can navigate around the 3D space which is rendered on their desktop using computer graphics technology. They can communicate with other avatars in the space just as in chat groups; the main difference here is the increased sense of space that the 3D brings and a dramatic increase in the potential experience. Challenges and Opportunities for the Future We believe that on-line communities, in particular, 3D communities and MUDs, represent the next Internet revolution. For this to happen, a number of issues must be addressed. These include: Bandwidth and scaling issues: current 3D multi-user systems [4] can handle, at most, hundreds of participants. One would like on-line communities to be orders of magnitude larger that this. While it can be argued that no more than dozens of participants might interact at any one time, it is highly desirable to allow participants to move from group to group in a seamless fashion; think of a very large high school, for example, or anything resembling a modern city. Architecture, scaling and bandwidth tradeoffs will be very important to understand. Persistent shared state: as communities mature, the need for an increase in shared state (rooms, objects, custom areas) will increase dramatically. Shared, customized state is what makes much of the interest in MUDs and MOOs so prevalent [3]. Server technology will have to make the shared state persistent, and use of multiple, scaled servers and efficient multicast communication will be needed. These issues are being addressed now in the case of MUD/MOO servers [5]. New communications media: on-line communities currently rely exclusively on text communication. This will clearly change, first with Internet telephony (such a service is already available [6]), but later with video, sound, shared documents, white boards, et cetera. We cannot predict how new technologies, such as cellular or text-to-speech, will affect on-line communities but we can be sure they will be affected. Such trends will increase bandwidth needs as well as information management technology. On-line communities and new applications: by far the most interesting aspects of on-line communities will arise when they are integrated with other sources of on-line information. For example, imagine the excitement and dynamism of an on-line community fully integrated with all or part of the information- rich World Wide Web. This has begun to be approximated by Chat groups associated with Web pages. There are many kinds of applications such as lifelong and distance learning, collaborative science, and electronic commerce that could be enhanced if not revolutionized with the integration of on-line communities. Conclusions We believe that current on-line communities will evolve towards rich, fully 3D virtual "worlds", integrated with other applications, and that this trend holds unimagined possibilities for entertainment, education, and scientific and social inquiry. Last but not least, it our responsibility to plan, not just for the technology, but for its equitable implementation and management. References 1. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1993 2. The Meadows (in conjunction with Mountain Lakes School District,, New Providence School District, Butte School District, U. Texas (Austin)) Description: The Meadows is a project to develop school-centered inter-communities: communities of communities hosted on the 'net. For more information, contact Vijay Saraswat (vj@research.att.com). 3. Lynn Cherny, The MUD Register: Conversational Modes of Action in a Text-Based Virtual Reality, Ph.D. Dissertation, Standford University, December, 1995 4. Such as WorldsChat, by Worlds Inc., San Francisco, Ca. and OzVirtual, by OZ Interactive, San Francisco, Ca. 5. Matrix, an architecture for world-wide net spaces, internal project, AT&T Labs - Research 6. OnLive!Talker and OnLive! Traveller, both by OnLive! Technologies, Cupertino, Ca. (www.onlive.com). * This white paper represents research, ideas and discussion from a number of individuals, including Ron Brachman, Julia Hirshberg, Lynn Cherney, and others, for which we are grateful.