We examine OnLive Traveler as a case study. Traveler is a clientserver
application allowing real-time synchronous communication
between individuals over the Internet. The Traveler client
interface presents the user with a shared virtual 3D world, in
which participants are represented by avatars. The primary mode
of communication is through multi-point, full duplex voice,
managed by the server.
Our design goal was to develop a virtual community system that
emulates natural social paradigms, allowing the participants to
sense a tele-presence, the subjective sensation that remote users
are actually co-located within a virtual space. Once this level of
immersive "sense of presence" and engagement is achieved, we
believe an enhanced level of socialization, learning, and
communication are achievable. We examine a number of very
specific design and implementation decisions that were made to
achieve this goal within platform constraints. We also will detail
some observed results gleaned from the virtual community userbase,
which has been online for several years
