ShipOfFools.com has created the first ever virtual church in 3D. This 3D church exists with the help of MacroMedia’s shockwave plugin – which you need to visit it. Once there, you are given control a 3D person that can move around, sit down, pray, cross themselves and of course do a hallelujah move. If too many people are there you are given a ghosted out character that can move around and listen but not talk or be seen by anyone else (due to bandwidth resrictions), otherwise you can talk and apparently (i’ve only been a ghost so far) select the avatar of your choice to represent you.

In their first week of being live, there were quite a few abuses of system and so further restrictions were put into place to keep one or two people from ruining it for (or at least distracting) everyone else. They have actual sermons on Sundays but it is open 24/7. When a sermon is not going on you can discuss things with fellow parishioners or practice doing the wave in the pews. While the stuff you can do is somewhat limited… it is still quite cool that they were able to pull off an interactive 3D environment in shockwave.

• 3D Church