…but this one might indeed be more useful for many people. The key is always to lower the barriers to entry. Make it easy to visit for people for whom blinking digital clocks cause panic. Make it easy to build stuff for people for whom word processing is just about the extent of their digital literacy. I would love to see archaeological VR become more than a sideshow, a passing fancy. Maybe Metaplace is the solution? Perhaps, if their promotional literature is true:

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web….Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player — whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data… you get the idea. No more walled garden.