A key contribution of computer graphics in the next decade could be to enable richer social interaction at a distance. The integration of real-time computer graphics and large-scale distributed systems is giving rise to a rich telecommunication medium, currently referred to as virtual worlds. This medium provides open-ended face-to-face communication among ad-hoc groups of people in custom environments and decouples shared spatial experiences from geographic constraints. Two stumbling blocks precluding the flourishing of the medium are the difficulty of creating compelling content and the stilted communication mechanisms currently utilized by consumer-grade systems. I will describe recent research that attempts to alleviate these difficulties.