While at Electric Communities, I designed the user interface for Microcosm, an online graphical virtual world, complete with avatars (3D and 2D), word balloons, gestures and facial expressions, "turfs," objects, etc., all the makings of an interesting world in which to develop a community. Unfortunately, the product never shipped (for both technical and organizational reasons), but the project was extremely interesting and challenging. I gave an ill-fated demo of the application at CHI 98 (it crashed 5 times), but the accompanying paper survived, Microcosm: Support for Virtual Communities via an On-line Graphical Environment. It gives a short description of the features as well as our approach to supporting components of community such as identity, reputation, social interaction, navigation, interacting with objects, security, and customization.

The most interesting aspect of designing Microcosm was the challenge of reinventing many of the standard user interface concepts so that they felt like they were being done "in world" by the character, rather than "out of world" by the user. For example, instead of selecting an object and pulling down a menu to pick up the object, we used pie menus that were associated with the object, so the user could simply point to the object and "flick up" to have the avatar walk over to the object and pick it up. It felt very much like picking up the object directly. Another example: Instead of creating a traditional map in a separate window, we created screens that placed the characters in places that looked down on an area so they could get an overview and click on anyplace they wanted to go, functioning just like a map. Microcosm was built by an extremely talented group of engineers and graphic designers, and it had a lot of interesting and novel concepts (too many, in fact). I've put together a demo of Microcosm, or rather a set of screen shots that show the interface and explain our approach to solving the in-world problem.