An early VoIP casualty. Think VoIP is a new phenomenon, and talking to people with Skype or Free World Dialup is incredible? Ten years ago, Onlive! put the Onlive! Traveler -- a collaborative VoIP product that's amazing even today -- into beta. With Traveler, a Windows95 (!) PC, a decent graphics card, a SoundBlaster and a dial-up Internet connection, you could not only chat with a friend, but participate in collaborative chats with the avatars of multiple friends in various 3-D rendered worlds. The avatars' lips even moved with your voice (.mpg movie). You could talk worldwide, for free. But even though Onlive! was around well before the boom, they were an unfortunate dot-com casualty, as Traveler never quite took off. Perhaps Traveler was doomed by the limited connectivity available in the mid 90's, or perhaps it was doomed by its occasionally creepy, fantastic 3-D designs -- but due to a number of collaborators, the Traveler still lives on today on a series of servers, and the (free) software still works on modern Windows PCs.
posted on Oct 7, 2005 - View this thread