The following are some screen shots taken of Microcosm, an online virtual world created at Electric Communities but that never shipped. The snapshots are intended to illustrate some of its more innovative features. (You can read more about Microcosm and its features.) Our design goal was to keep the user immersed in the world, so we tried to offer "in world" ways of doing things (with the user acting as the avatar rather than as the user) instead of using traditional user interface elements such as popup windows and pulldown menus.

Gestures and Word Balloons. This avatar is smiling and waving. The history of word balloons at the top half of the region shows that this avatar spoke a "speak" and "thought" balloon while on the right side of the region, and then move to the left where she used an "exclaim" and "emote" balloon. Each avatar's balloons are of a certain color. The balloons, gestures, and facial expressions are set at the bottom of the window (and there were keyboard shortcuts as well). There is no text entry field in Microcosm. You just start typing and a pending word balloon appears over your avatars head. When you press Enter, it becomes visible to others and becomes part of the conversation scrolling in the upper part of the region. Avatars can send each other "telepathy," which can be seen only by the sender and recipient, not the others in the region, and which can be sent between avatar in different regions. Telepathy balloons are white so you can tell them from "out loud" balloons.

Microcosm pie menus. As the user's avatar is holding a chair the user clicks on the sand where she wants to put it and moves the cursor down to select "Put here." The avatar moves over to put it the chair down there. Users don't have to wait for the pie menu to come up — they can just click-and-flick in the right direction and that menu item will be selected. The location of menu items in the pie menu were chosen to make sense in the world, e.g. "Pick up" is at the top and "Put here" is at the bottom. Our hope was that these pie menus would help users feel like they are acting as the avatar.

Microcosm Turf. The cursor is pointing at the avatar, showing her name to be Sunstar. (Avatar labels always appear in purple, objects in yellow, regions in green, so you can tell what's what.) The objects in the region came from a Catalog, and the avatar moved and rotated them to decorate the turf. The purple square against the left back wall is a portal to another region. If you click on it, your avatar teleports to that region.

Microcosm map region. This region is a map of the Beach neighorhood. As you move your cursor over areas that represent regions in the area, the labels appear in green. If you click on one, your avatar teleports to that region.

Multiple points of view. This region has a Point of View (POV) menu, triggered from the triangular area in the lower-left of the window. The menu shows you several points of view of this same region, all of them "active" in that you see real-time action happen in the menu frames. If you select one, your point of view changes to the one previewed but you stay in the same region. Microcosm was a "2.5D" world in that the user's point of view does not move as the character moves, but the regions had 3D geometry, making this POV feature possible.