Yes, Tia, I appreciate Corinne's honesty and we encountered this same problem years ago when first starting to work in Active Worlds. I started out with scientific data that I wanted to share as a communication tool and that had already been formatted for 3D. So we put it out online as VRML worlds.
Well, no one in the general public at the time could view a 5 meg file and interact with it on their desktops. Then we did "exhibits" that could be explored on tested workstations. That works.
So we had "the beef" to begin with. It was very hard to get that "beef", useful content, into AW, but it can be done and there is a certain value to that (serious games). There is also a huge value to teaching people to use the medium for creation and communication and in figuring out how to put more advanced tools with easy interfaces in their hands. So, for example, I am really excited about SketchUp and have colleagues working on a tutorial that will help students learn to use it to model objects for Active Worlds. I need to learn more about how to do that in Second Life. And I am excited about the potential for us to identify a suite of tools/features that would be useful for Multiverse as it comes on line.
Cheers,
Margaret