Without doubt, future Cyberspaces will go beyond the technical
abilities of todays low-band-with and mostly text-based MUDs and
related technologies. But, consider this early statement by
by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer ([Morningstar et Farmer, 1990]),
main contributors to the Lucasfilm Habitat
project started in 1985 and thriving today in Japan as ``Fujitsu Habitat'':
The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented. While we find much of the work presently being done on elaborate interface technologies & DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines, and so on & both exciting and promising, the almost mystical euphoria that currently seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced. We can't help having a nagging sense that it's all a bit of a distraction from the really pressing issues. At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment. It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another. Beyond a foundation set of communications capabilities, the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, is a peripheral concern.
Similar arguments can be heard in the MOO community. They all can be summarized by the following statement:
We can build effective interactive many-user Cyberspaces today
People feel a strong need to talk to people on the Internet while retrieving and uploading information, and the MOOs offer one todays best ``many users space'' for that.