Microsoft V-Chat

» see vchat.microsoft.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

V-Chat's selling point was that you could walk up to somebody. Not open a window with their name on it. Cross a floor and be visibly standing next to them while you typed. In December 1995 that had not been done at consumer scale, and Microsoft shipped it on The Microsoft Network as free software before it shipped a web browser anyone remembers.

It came out of Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group, the same group that later produced Comic Chat. Version 1.0 was managed by Linda Stone, with Lili Cheng among the people who built it. Version 1.1 needed dedicated V-Chat servers. Version 2.0, which stabilized in January 1998, dropped that requirement and rode on plain IRC, so anyone with an IRC server and a world file could host a room.

The first room I ever stood in with other people was a de_dust server in an Ankara internet cafe around 2002, and by then nobody was calling it a virtual world. It was just a map. Whatever V-Chat had been doing seven years earlier had gotten absorbed into games and stopped being its own product category, and the part that reached Turkey was MSN Messenger, which is a contact list.

~ the case file ~

~ what you actually saw ~

Calling it 3D flatters it. The environment had depth and the people in it did not: your avatar was a sprite with a front and a back, and turning around swapped the picture. Animation amounted to a set of gestures you could fire off. The whole thing looked like a diorama built out of cutouts, which is roughly what it was.

The interesting consequence is that an avatar was a file. You made one in whatever paint program you had, put it somewhere on the web, and pointed V-Chat at the address so other clients could fetch it. That is a strange amount of self-representation to hand a user in 1996, and it meant your appearance depended on somebody's free hosting staying up.

~ the worlds ~

V-Chat shipped with almost nothing in it. You got a Lobby and something called a Homespace, and every other room arrived as a download when you walked toward it. Microsoft ran the official ones and contracted designers to build them: Philip Reay made The Fishbowl and Lunar Islands, an animation outfit called Tooned In made the Kiva world. Anyone else could host their own.

That architecture is why so little of it survives. The client is easy to find and still runs. The rooms lived on servers that went away, and archivists have spent years reassembling a partial collection out of dead links and personal backups. You can install V-Chat today and have almost nowhere to go.

~ the angels ~

The community organized itself the way early online communities usually did, which is to say a group of regulars ended up doing the work. The Angel Society was invitation-only, existed to help new users find their footing, and carried enough standing that Microsoft gave its members an administrative role in the product. Volunteer moderation with a title attached, a decade before anyone wrote a policy about it.

~ how it went quiet ~

The client stopped being updated on 24 March 1998 and then simply sat there for three more years while Microsoft's attention moved to Messenger. V-Chat had always been described internally as the experiment ahead of a bigger project called V-Worlds. V-Worlds got finished. It was never widely deployed, and nothing replaced the thing it was supposed to replace.

The servers went off in March 2001. There was no announcement, because by then there was nobody left to announce it to.

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