EdMOO is a research project by Bernard Holkner from Monash University, Australia that demonstrates the initial integration of text-based worlds with the multimedia environment of the Web. While you can use the Internet to display an image of objects in the room and a photo of the person, the world and its inhabitants are constructed of words. Developers Patti Schank and Mark Schlager take advantage of evolving communication tools to provide teachers with new forms of exchange. Objects in the room have special properties. For example if people sit together on a coach, their converstation becomes private, not available to other people in the room.
Participants can also share a sketchpad drawing on it at the same time.
Participants can also open a web page and share it with the people who are virtually with them in this workspace. All these tools help make an online meetings feel very real. It created standards and precedents for how future cyberspace worlds would be built and operated. While we have only made the first inroads onto these problems, a few things have become clear. The most important of these is that managing a cyberspace world is not like managing the world inside a single-user application or even a conventional online service.