The design, implementation, and evaluation of what the authors call “inhabited television” is described. Inhabited television arises from the combining of broadcast television with collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). It aims at providing both a new entertainment environment and a social communication medium. In inhabited television, the public has the opportunity to interact online with a show that takes place in a shared virtual environment. Whereas the general structure of this show is pre-defined, the actual form it will take directly depends on audience interaction. Another (offline) public will be watching, mostly asynchronously, the results of this interactivity.

Inhabited television is therefore comprised of three types of inhabitants: the “performers,” who play on stage; the real “inhabitants,” the on-line audience interacting with the performers through different devices; and the “viewers”, the offline public that passively experiences the interaction staged in the virtual world.

To evaluate this interaction spectrum, several scenarios based on this “layered participation,” as the authors name it, have been designed and tested. At one end, there is the (mainly technical) problem of conceiving an entertaining online interaction, including, for example, problems related to real-time collaboration. At the other extreme, there is the need to engage a merely passive audience. The results of these experiments are discussed in detail in the paper.

Strikingly, the features that emerge seem common to all settings, regardless of the specific form taken by inhabited television: the performers-inhabitants interactions are mostly game-like, viewers’ engagement is low, the show narrative is poor, and the use of such an advanced technology to produce a traditional show is considered disappointing. Still, this is certainly a promising research area, stretching and experimenting with technological creativity.