Why isn The Palace 3-D Like AlphaWorld or Doom?
There are several reasons why The Palace is not 3-D. The primary reason is that The Palace is first and foremost meant to be the best online social space possible — it is not meant to be an imitation of reality. 3-D works great in a game like DOOM but presents certain problems in a shared virtual social space: you can’t always see people that are in a room with you; you have to ‘walk’ between spaces that are far away from one another, instead of just ‘going there’. In short, projecting 3-D into the inherently 2-D universe of the computer monitor leads to some distortions and bad metaphors which are not best served by a ‘faux 3-D’ environment. A 3-D environment would destroy the ‘browseability’ of moving easily from Palace server to Palace server across the distributed environment of the Internet. Each time you come to a new server, there is new information to be downloaded to your computer — if the Palace were 3-D, the amount of that information would be staggering, taking several or
