Living life Vicariously

There are a few qualitative differences from Instant Messaging to chatting in an online 3D environment. Online 3D worlds such as activeworlds.com is much more than just chatting, it's living vicariously. Instead of a a white page with writing and a little box for you to reply in like in IM's you can see the avatar who your chatting with and your surroundings, which takes you away from reality.
It gives people the chance to be someone they want to be or maybe to speculate on situations. One should tread with caution when living in these online worlds as it may appear your chatting to Jen Hawkins secret twin sister but it's reallyits someone like this.


Unfortunatley you can't really tell...
The 3D aspect does make online chatting more fun, being able to customize your avatar and so on, I'm sure some are used to meet online and just socialize, other sites are for getting up to no good online style and some seem innocent and harmless like habbohtel.com but people always turn something good into bad and I'm sure theres a lot of people posing as something else for all the wrong reasons!

Real Life VS Online

Though I am sure there are much worse people doing much worse things which I won't go into.

The 3D aspect does make some difference. It creates a alternate reality for people to be what or who they want to be. Though it takes much longer to do everything including just chatting to someone online.
From a glance it seems to be the superior version of instant messaging but after using it and seeing the impracticalities the 3D aspect is really not that interesting.
Though I am sure once better technology comes along and avatars are more or less look and move online like real people...
Things may get interesting!

Yumcha33