Virtual Chat Sites

Hey all,
Just went on Active Worlds ( http://www.activeworlds.com ). It claims to be the webs most powerful virtual reality experience. Its actually quite cool. You can visit the hundreds of thousands of users to chat and play with them. With the variety of camera angles you can really get a good look around the place. You can do a whole bunch of things such as swim, drive cars, just on boats and fly. You can also go into different worlds and meet new people. I didnt exactly like the graphics of this one though, it was like 'choppy' and had a slow frame rate. I rate this virtual chat site a 5/10.

IMVU (http://www.imvu.com) was really good. The graphics were good, it was alot like the game, the sims. Unline the last game, i think this games graphics were alot 'smoother'. What I enjoyed about this game was you got to choose who you actually were, you had a selection of people and you could modify them by clothes, hair, eye colour, skin colour ect... There is a bit of a market in this site though, when you first sign up, you get a free 1000 credits, which is like money there. But once you have used all those credits you have to buy things with actualy money Eg) Different hair styles range from about 60 cents to $1 in Aus money. I spoke to some new members to the site and asked about what they thought. The few i did speak to said they hated the fact the conversations are in speech bubbles. One of the cool things about this virtual chat site is you have a ton of different actions and emotions you can choose. You can even do a 'kissanova', thumb wars and smack people in the face.... You can do some violent moves. Its a chat site you can get addicted to. I rate this virtual chat site a 8/10.

Habbo (http://habbo.com.au) was a nightmare registering, it took forever loading. Then told me it could not load, from what i saw it was very simple and pixelated. It also looked like it was made for younger people. I rate this a 2/10.

The next one tried was second life (http://www.secondlife.com) I agree with what the tutorial task said, it is annoying to get into if you only want a quick look. It took a little bit to download but by the time i got on there it would not log me on. I tried a few times but it continued to say log on failed. Then at the bottom of the screen they have a news and announcements section with an article saying they were having problems with increased traffic into the site which may result in log on failure. I will defiently give this one a go later on, it looks like it will be a good one. Rating 4/10.

I find virtual chat sites very interesting. Inconvient to the dial up user (yes thats me, hopefully broadband will be up by next week). They are more entertaining than the original Msn Messenger, but some people do enjoy the simplicity of it. My favourite one would have to be IMVU, but as a fan of the sims i cannot speak for other people. Some people in the class were saying how everyone says they are young but in reality beleive they are old, ill have to agree, everone asked my age first then amazing they were the same age.