Welcome to flatplaces.net!
Here you will find the old Microsoft V-Chat worlds preserved and converted to be experienced on the web. I hope that they will be enjoyed both by those that remember the old V-Chat service from back in the late 1990’s and those that never saw it.
Microsoft V-Chat was one of the first freely available 3D chat programs. The 3D worlds it came with were all very primitive by today’s standards, with low polygon counts and low resolution textures, but back in the day it was about as much as the average PC could manage. Despite this (and probably because of this) many of the 3D worlds had a charm of their own that I think is worth preserving.
Apart from the graphics textures and sounds the V-Chat worlds were stored in a closed proprietary format for which no information was available. With it becoming more and more difficult to run the original V-Chat program, transforming the worlds to an open standard format is the best way to preserve them. I’ve managed to decipher enough of the file format to convert them to the X3D standard format. I’ve also a recreated the V-Chat keyboard navigation, with extensions for tablets.
Phil
May 2019, Cheltenham, UK