"Lucasfilm's Habitat -- it's a wonderful new place that's simply out of this world. Coming to life only on QuantumLink." Thus ends this remarkable demo of Habitat, Lucasfilm's graphical virtual world that ran on the QuantumLink (later known as AOL) network. Put together in 1986 by one the co-designer of Habitat, Chip Morningstar, this video addresses many of the features and issues of virtual worlds, such as avatar creation and experimentation with identities.

For more information on Habitat, see Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer, "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat," originally presented at the First International Conference on Cyberspace, Univ. of Texas at Austin (1990), and first published in Cyberspace: First Steps,, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1991): 273-301. This essay has since been reprinted many times and is also available here: http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html.

This footage was supplied to the Preserving Virtual Worlds project by Bruce Damer from his collection of videos documenting the history of virtual worlds.

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