Zora is a multi-user graphical environment specifically developed to help users design and inhabit a virtual city. Several users can interact and communicate with each other in real time through a chat system. Users can populate the virtual world with their own interactive creations. They can design objects, characters, personal spaces, and a virtual community. Users can make avatars to represent themselves and develop their corresponding profiles that specify personal heroes and villains, cherished values, and biographies.

Zora is a web-based environment explicitly designed to help young people explore issues of identity and to promote positive development through the use of technology. The first version of Zora was developed while Prof. Bers was completing her doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab, using
the Micorsoft Virtual Worlds development platform. The new version of Zora is being developed at Tufts University by
Prof. Bers, her team of students in the DevTech research group and Academic Technologies using the ActiveWorlds platform.