A figure approaches. When it gets close enough, I see that it is a giant, electric blue teddy bear in wraparound shades and an Aloha shirt that even the most eager Midwesterner wouldn’t be caught dead in. When the bear moves closer, I feel a vague sense of unease.

“Hi, little bunny,” it says.

My nose and tail twitch warily. “Hi,” I say back.

“Aren’t you a cute little wabbit!” it says.

“Cute enough, I suppose,” I reply noncommittally.

“Oooooh, I’d like to just gobble you up, little bunny!” the bear says. “Are you horny?”

With a sigh of disgust and resignation, I zap out of the garden. I was having such fun there, in the pretty garden, till the damn bear showed up. Bears.

Visions of the Future

More than a decade ago, I flipped the toggle switch on “my” first PC, an old IBM XT which belonged to the tiny credit union where I worked. For months, I would spend many hours a day immersed in basic spreadsheets and rudimentary desktop publishing, and when my eyes and back gave out, I’d stumble home through dark and snowy New England streets to a restless sleep which yielded visions of the future.

I remember dreaming about this technology with an anticipation of great delight, a night-before-Christmas sense of hope and wonder. Such dreams! Floating through digital meadows under skies that would never darken, arcing over infinite roads at a sweet and leisurely pace, swimming through electrons. I realize now that I was dreaming about the universe of avatars. Avatars are figures which inhabit three-dimensional, virtual-reality environments, moving through cities constructed entirely in code, exploring impossibly beautiful terrains with strangers from faraway places.

And the technology I dreamed about is now real. It’s called virtual reality, and it’s part of the future of this incredible new world.

Humanizing the Inhuman

As a fairly seasoned user of Internet Relay Chat (see earlier columns for the gory details), I will tell you that virtual reality has its ups and downs. Maneuvering in the third dimension can be slow, clumsy, or downright impossible, especially at modem speeds of less than 28.8 kbps or processor speeds less than Pentium. You’ll need Windows 95 or NT for most of these programs (though some have made Macintosh versions available), a minimum of 16 MB of RAM, and disk space of between 5 and 25 MB, depending on your travels. And some of them - but not all - come with a price tag.

However, the benefits are myriad. Virtual reality humanizes cyberspace, in a strange sort of way. It enables us to move electronic relationships, in which people are nothing more than lines of text scrolling against a dull white screen, into something that feels, in spite of its rather Willam-Gibsonesque quality, quite real.

In these incredible worlds, I can play backgammon with a banana from Brazil; I can preen in front of a mirror with a butterfly named Margaret; I can build a log cabin with an assorted group of animals, vegetables, and minerals; and I can attend a group discussion on webpage construction, hosted by Zippy the winged elf who, for the entire duration of the session, sits perched on the furry back of a German Shepherd named Bill. Wow!

Interactive environments, exclusively text-based until just a few short years ago, have evolved with the same astonishing speed as everything else here in cyberspace. It’s akin to watching bamboo grow. Many of these environments are constructed with something called VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), pronounced "ver-mul". VRML allows you to build your own world and your own avatar (think character) and connect them both, to this vast and expanding labyrinth.

Virtual reality is a computer simulation that gives the illusion of being in another place. It is a new medium, and an emerging standard for graphics and interactivity. Many virtual worlds have their own politics, economy, traditions, and culture. Although a few of the worlds are designed to be places that you explore on your own, most allow for multiple users, in which you can see the other folks there with you. The ability to share a world with friends is a powerfully attractive feature of this new technology.

As stated rather eloquently in the executive summary of Circle of Fire Technologies, Inc., a developer of virtual worlds, “The Web is a solitary place. People from around the world can have the same interests, visit the same 2D web page at the same time and have no idea anyone else is there.”

Sure, one encounters the occasional libidinous bear here, but the fascination of the virtual world is the chance to learn from and with the people here, to work together to build communities without borders.

Get You Some!

A few months ago, when I first discovered avatars and virtual worlds, I knew that I wanted to write about them, so I bookmarked a slew of places in my Internet browser, expecting to come back to them eventually. When I sat down to write this column, I tried to use the bookmarks to get back to the websites, and received a brutal lesson about the transience of cyberspace. Many of the URLs I had bookmarked were no longer functional.

Searching on “avatars” in Lycos (a fairly decent search engine) yielded interesting results: excerpts from The Dawn Horse Testament, and something called The Dreaded Gom-Boo. (Apparently an “avatar” is an important element of Hindu philosophy.) So I tried Magellan, and was rewarded with the discovery of the one place you need to know about, for all your 3-D needs: a site created and maintained by the Contact Consortium, at www.ccon.org.

The Contact Consortium, “formed to become a focus for the theme of human culture and contact in digital space”, maintains a great site with up-to-date information (including sample screens from each place) on great virtual world programs like The Palace, Active Worlds, Comic Chat, Oz-Virtual, Black Sun, and Worlds Chat.

The next generation of virtual reality includes connectivity through voice and video. Already, you can use plug-in voice programs to talk, in real-time, with your virtual friends. And after that, who knows? A T-1 line, direct to the soul, cannot be far behind.

Caroline Wright, of WRIGHT FOR YOU Word Services, is a freelance writer. A former resident of Hawaii, she now lives in rural South Carolina. Feel free to e-mail your comments to Caroline at cw@wrightforyou.com.