Some of the questions fielded so far ask about the next ten years of the site and specifically about making the context of the site more 3D, perhaps more immersive.

AncientWorlds/AncientSites was launched from a sort of demiurge to "be" in Ancient Rome, to create an interactive environment that one can walk through. Oddly, for various technical reasons, this dream of integrating 3D environment and community is still elusive today.

In 1994, the early days of the Mosaic browser (the predecessor to Netscape Navigator), the main expectation of the web was simple - a way for individuals to publish static information pages. The idea of community was far off. By focusing on a navigable 3D environment to be delivered over the web, we were able to achieve some early success, using the straight-forward publishing apparatus of the web to generate a walk through using hyper-linked images, not unlike the game Myst that was available on CD ROMs around the same time. This environment became the setting for the online game SPQR, Chapter 1 of which is still online here today.

Before we were able to go much further in the development of the 3D world, we were delivered an unexpected lesson in the first steps of online community. We had created a bulletin board for SPQR players called The Rostra at the Time Warner site, Pathfinder (where SPQR was published). We tried to keep up with the daily posts of the players, expecting it would be a place to get some simple feedback on the game and bug reports (yes, even then we were generating entire bug species). But what we were privileged to witnessed was one of the earliest web-based, online communities forming.

We resolved to spend our development resources enabling this small but flourishing community. We had a time limit handed to us when Time Warner decided to remove all their BBs - they were too labor intensive and generated no revenues. We wrote our own BB and homepage system to start. Once we got the basics done, we tried to add BB functionality to the 3D space of SPQR using Java applets. After some mixed tests of something we called NaviChat, we realized that it was too early to integrate a 3D world and community features.

For the next few years, we continued to add additional features to the site such as Whos Online and Grams (one of the firstweb-based instant messaging services). It was fascinating to watch how the members were able to conjure up their own worlds with text and images. Every time we made a serious push to spatialize the community environment, we were met with engineering challenges that seemed insurmountable while the community moved on, adapted, and grew. We included some tours and chapters of 3D games set in Athens and New Amsterdam, but we could not bring the communications functions and a 3D navigable world together.

Toward the end of CyberSites history, we spent our efforts on developing an Article system to round off the feature set. The Article system quickly became the prototype for The Vines network, which itself was a prototypical Wikipedia. Although the Vines grew at an amazing rate, drawing 3 million unique visitors per month, it was not able to make any revenues. As the dotcom funding ran dry, so did the company's prospects for any future development.

After the company folded, I set out to create a smaller service that would appeal to the original AncientSites community. The first order of business was to replicate the functionality of AncientSites but with fewer bugs and downtime. Though there are bugs here today and proposed features that could improve the site, AW is much more sea-worthy than AS ever was.

I also started to develop a version of NaviChat using Flash rather than Java applets. But in the end, I thought it better to wait for realtime 3D technologies to develop further. Here is an image from the Flash client to the NaviChat server:

Both avatars in the scene facing the same direction

When then will 3D be merged with community? This is hard to say. There are many examples of realtime 3D Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMORGs) such as World of Warcraft and social worlds such as Second Life, but these are both intensive to develop and require some fast 3D hardware on the client side. There are some good engines becoming available such as the Unity engine for creating interactive 3D worlds and I have been doing some experiments with this. As good as these engines are getting for creating 3D worlds and letting people explore them in realtime, the engineering challenge is still high on the server side.

It is still my dream that we can get there in the next few years. I am sure that sometime in the next 10 to 20 years there will be a virtual Roman city with a million inhabitants. If AncientWorlds creates it, it will be a god mixture of social, historical and role play activities. Also we will be able to extend the effort to Hellas, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Celtia, Germania, The Orient, and the Americas.