"I'm not an online gamer, but how does Atmosphere compare to EverQuest and the like? If only we could hop into a world as immersive as Stephenson's Metaverse."

It doesn't. The engine is simply not up to it graphically - and the servers are as far as I can tell, completely unsuited for such an application even if the graphics got better.

That is sort of my point - there has been millions of dollars of research into what it takes to create an engaging system... and it turns out the game engines are the result. You don't have to have guns in Quake 3 - you can use the engine to present architecture - but the graphic power and flexibility are crucial.

When I see what the state of the art is, I just think that those engines hold the future. Atmosphere kind of (to me) shows it's roots as a simple application to show simple 3D objects inside a browser.