InterSpace Cyber Society

» see cybersociety.elcs.intsp.or.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

NTT announced the InterSpace system on 4 January 1995. It was a networked 3D world carrying one feature that still sounds early: a camera pointed at your face, and the image it captured sitting exactly where the avatar's face would be, so your own expression looked out of the doll. The research came out of NTT Human Interface Laboratories, renamed NTT Cyber Space Laboratories in the 1999 reorganization, and it took two and a half years to reach the public.

The public version was called InterSpace Cyber Society, it was free, and registration opened on 17 July 1997 with ten thousand places. You downloaded a Windows client, a native application rather than a browser plugin, which rendered through Direct3D and loaded worlds in NTT's own .isv format. NEC's PC-98 machines got support that October, which tells you precisely which market this was built for. Group voice was capped at two people speaking at once, with a separate one-to-one videophone for an actual call.

What was inside it was stranger than the technology. There was a digital aquarium you swam around in, where clicking a fish opened a web page about that fish. There were multimedia message boards and an exhibition hall with information kiosks along the walls. NTT recruited five content providers in August 1997 to fill the place. No user number was ever published, and those ten thousand registration slots remain the only figure anybody can point at.

On Monday 28 February 2000 the operator posted a closing notice. The world would end at five in the afternoon on Thursday 30 March, and CD-ROM orders would close on the twelfth. The notice thanks users for the run since July 1997 and says very little else. Both weekdays check out against the calendar, and the last archived capture of the host that served it is 13 March 2000.

~ the case file ~

~ the face on the avatar ~

The video face is the reason this one is worth remembering. A 1997 avatar was a mannequin you drove around and everybody's answer to identity was a name tag floating above it. NTT cut a hole where the head should be and put your actual face in it, from a camera feed or a still you supplied. The client's avatar dialog carried a checkbox reading ビデオを使用, use video.

The hardware is what makes this distance rather than nostalgia. A webcam in 1997 was a specialty purchase, and the Turkish internet I joined the following year ran at 33.6k over the same phone line the household needed for phone calls. A 3D client streaming live video of your face was out of reach in every sense available, the money included.

~ the notice in the archive ~

The closing notice had already been filed away by the time a crawler found it. It lived in old_secre2.htm, the page where past announcements went, and it survives only because the archive picked that page up four months after posting. The homepage captures from the same weeks give no hint that anything was ending.

Pages from this host are Shift_JIS, except one 1998 subdomain that is EUC-JP, and decoding the wrong one yields text that looks like language and means nothing. Which is a fair description of how most dead Japanese web history reads from the outside.

~ the other half of it ~

InterSpace had a commercial side that outlived the free world. NTT Software Corporation ran a product line called InterSpaceClub out of a dedicated InterSpace Division, and it went places the Cyber Society never did: an online English-conversation school, and a remote-seminar system still being demonstrated at a Cisco event in a Shinagawa hotel in November 2002.

Nobody announced the end of that one. The last capture of its site is 1 February 2003, an ordinary live page carrying a copyright line reading 1998 to 2002. The domain intsp.or.jp no longer resolves, and neither does ntts.co.jp, because NTT Software was folded into NTT TechnoCross. Two products under one name, and only the free one got a goodbye.

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