More Atmosphere^TM-ic adventures.

Atmosphere^TM -- the MUD gang will be very excited with this one.
Pick your avatar and off you go exploring your world. Interacting with others along the way.

Ask that penguin over there what he thinks.

Tonight I landed in and typed "anybody know where to find avatars on the web?" into the text entry box. Lawrence Tux replied: "Meet me in the center and I'll give you some..." or something along those lines. I went to the "center" -- more like a "town square" three steps up with four columns -- anyway, no one there. I see an Adobe banner and think, what the heck. Turns out the "hallway" isn't and there's nobody.

"Tester [my name at the time] turn around. See the penguin?"
And that's how I met Laurence Tux the Penguin -- "LT" as I like to type him ;-)

LT was in the midst of a tutorial -- we'd managed to get my name changed to DS -- when the room got too busy.
LT offered me a link to Rm2, but I wasn't able to access the link. Traffic on the server got a little heavy and I lost my tutor when I thanked LT and bailed. Too bad I 'd looked forward to a guided tour of this world.

Before I begin sounding too much more like a marketeer for adobe.com, I should offer the following observations to this point:

• the install file is a 10 MB download
  
• unless you've got a very robust connection to the Internet this download will take a long time
  
• if the "robust" connection you're using is at work -- know that your System Administrator will notice
  
• those on dial-up connections at home might consider starting the download before bed one night
  
• I need to see avatars in action in a dial-up world
  

That said, the potential here strikes me as huge. Navigable worlds with portals to other worlds, links to the WWW. Anybody who has ever worked an Adobe graphics program will be off to the races. I've only ever used Framemaker and Acrobat, but even I've been able to build a "house" -- a box with a hole in it -- and then "viewed" my creation from the inside in this space.

As an M.Ed. student of Curriculum, specializing in Computer Applications, I'm inspired by the possibilities.