Alive on the Grid demonstrated some of the possibilities for the use of high-speed networks and immersive displays in interactive art. The scale of the environment currently limits it to high-end computers and research networks that are rarely available to the public, but with time similar systems will become mainstream.
The pieces that make up Alive on the Grid cover a wide range of visual styles and styles of interaction. Presenting these pieces in a public show was vital to learning how well these approaches worked, by how other people reacted to them, and to hammering out the technical difficulties.
Perhaps the most important outstanding issue faced by Alive on the Grid, and its developers, is the need for the networking middleware to be more robust. We need to make it easier for users to run these sorts of applications in a distributed mode, especially when network limitations require a less-than-simple configuration, such as was used at the Ars Electronica Festival. Making it so that sharing an immersive virtual environment is as easy as sharing a web page will lead to an explosion in the creation of these environments and exploration of new concepts for interaction.