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Metaverse the Next Big Thing?
CrashPanic writes to tell us TCS Daily has an article entitled "The Next Big Thing" which is about Multiverse. It does a good job of making the case for the evolution to a 3D web through the lens of the past history of Netscape. From the article: "Forces are coalescing that will produce a shift comparable at least to the spread of broadband. This change will have enormous financial, cultural and political repercussions, and the most interesting aspect of the coming transformation is that it will not be some new and unexpected thing. Rather, the Web for many will become the cliched 3D virtual reality that has been so overused as a literary and cinematic devise that most of us have forgotten how compelling that vision was when it first appeared."
Is it practical?
... 3D web is very appealing, and we are starting to get the tools to work with these, but as long as we have the trusty mouse and keyboard, navigation in a 3D realm will always be awkward.
;)
Come on now
Also there is the production costs involved with making such things.
I am not sure if the industry will see this as the Next Big Thing (tm) soon.
--
Mike, the Anonymous Coward
and the author managed to get through the whole article without using the FLA: VRML!
This man uses several pages to talk about the origins of the web and how revolutionary netscape navigator was, but he doesn't even remember it's immediate predecessor NCSA Mosaic, or the predecessor of the web: gopher? And you expect me to think this person is more qualified to predict the future of the web, than someone else, such as my grandmother?
Imagine how much more useful your computer experience would be if you were able to design a virtual office as large or complex as you needed, and reach anything in it without leaving your chair.
My God! They have invented Microsoft Bob!
Patrick Cox should stick to making shoes.
The current web represents a huge investment in time, effort and money. It's not going anywhere for a long time.
Carpe Daemon
...not "devise". Pah!
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
The computers most of us use give us a virtual desktop complete with files and crap scattered around. Minus spilled coffee I suppose.
It would be next to impossible to convince a non-technical person to virtually walk through a filing system to find their work when they could just browse to it normally without the 3D stuff.
But the desktop paradigm breaks down when we talk about portable devices. These devices are both much more limited (by being small) and much more powerful (because by their nature they have to be close to the user and their environment) that a totally new way of seeing the inside of your system may have traction.
William Gibson had this in Virtual Light. Neal Stephenson had it in Snow Crash. I think it will eventually come true.
One thing I am sure of. If I am going to have little LCD screens in my glasses I want to focus on infinity to look at them. Not sure how you do that without massive amounts of refractive material in the small space available.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
One cannot help but get the impression that changes from this point forward will resemble consecutive versions of the Windows OS -- more a honing than transformation.
Only if you have the most narrow, linear and unimaginative mind.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
This sounds like change for the sake of change.
Until there is a real NEED for this, I don't see it happening.
That said, I would think that true VR will come to game consoles long before it comes to any generic computer. In the Console market, this seems like a natural evolution and not just some NEAT-O idea being added on for the sake of change.
The Metaverse, if anyone manages to create one that is truly decentralised, will co-exist with the web. If it's going to replace anything, it's going to replace IRC - a fun place to wander around aimlessly and meet new people, or to form a small group of friends you have things in common with regardless of your physical location. The web is a resource for finding or publishing information. The Metaverse is a communications tool for hanging out with friends and meeting new people.
That thechnology will not anywhere close users unless is cheap enough. If it's expensive (I bet it is) users will be effectively prohibited from using it. If they don't want to use it - there'll be no software for it.
It's kind of the same like with VR glasses. They came few years ago with big hype of being the NEXT GREAT THING. Nothing like that happend. Why? Price. Prices even now are too high. A way too high. It's not that VR glasses are not useful and fun. Everybody who tried them know - they ARE. But who's going to pay $2000 or more for them?
Same as always - business goes first. Maybe except OSS.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
...those good old articles which tried to explain the web using real-life examples (early 90s)? Just by reading them I would NOT have been prepared for using the Internet at ALL. I remember the glowing images I had in my head of navigating the Internet like Neo walks in the Matrix. It was sooo unfair when that didn't happen. And it hasn't happened yet... though in my older, wiser (or more paranoid) years that kind of experience would be a little unsettling - especially considering the types of questions the Matrix raised!
Actually, forget that. I WANT to be able to download whole Zip drives of information in my brain and to be superman. Give me the plug!!
Man, I love buzzword bingo.
Imagine the wealth of p0rn and cyberhookers being attracted to this. :) and what will the script kiddies do (how do you get robbed in a VR environment)?
Until now, you had to enter an URL to get the smut, from now on its just like in the old days...just stroll along a (digital) back alley and you get some of the weirdest offers.
Two things bother me here...What will the spammers come up with (naked beauties handing out pamphlets?
Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango
Seems to be taking off. 3D environments have their place (gaming, social interaction, data visualisation even), but I don't see it replacing the web for the bulk of what's already out there any time soon.
Yes, and probably it will be named something like Second Life. Oh wait...
Second Life is good, but it's not quite decentralised - one company has the monopoly on renting land to users. That's the equivalent of the W3C renting web sites to anyone who wants to write pages on one.
I remember going to a presentation at SGI UK in about 1997, which titled something like "Web 2.0 - the coming 3D web space". It was about how the next generation of the web would all be in 3D. I thought it was bollocks then, and I think it's bollocks today.
If 3D user interfaces were better then we'd be using 3D versions of desktop applications by now. Clearly Photoshop or Microsoft Word with a 3D interface doesn't make much sense, so why should it for online applications?
C# client with a java server?
No.
Bender: Behold... the Internet.
Fry: My God! It's full of ads!
..at first, but like any windows user one will begin to live with it.
My Blog | Badsh
Second Life, or some successor, may be the thing to kickstart it. Already we're hearing about the likes of Sun and Reuters setting up camp there.
To really gain traction though it would need to be as free (speech and beer) as the web is, and so long as it's run by a single company, it probably won't be.
Agreed 100%. The same *3D is teh bett3r" bullshit is often applied to video games. Even a game like worms, which by its very nature was 2D (or lemmings) is 'reminagined' in 3D, and none the better for it. The idea of navigating a 3D inernet just sounds like hell to me right now. I'm all for a greater variety of 3D online communities and worlds like second life, I hope such things thrive and expand, but to think I'd need to fire up some 3D avatar to go check my share prices is just bullshit.
Just because computers have the capability to do X, does not mean that X is desireable.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
The Dude: Well, I still jerk off manually.
Now look at you Apple, ALL BACK OF THE BUS AND SHIT
It is as if thousands of Flash developers cried out, and were suddenly silenced. Something terrible is about to happen...
The reason VR (by which I mean the illusion of reality through 3D googles and motion sensing) was such a flash in the pan was that the concept was sound but the technology wasn't ready.
I remember trying it out in arcades in the early 90s. This was a time when we'd see the first Ridge Racer coin op and be astonished by the texture mapped 3D.
The VR stuff was low res (whether due to the graphics cards used or the screen technology in the goggles), used flat shaded models with low poly counts. But that wasn't the problem, the problem was the low frame rate combined with the slow response time of position detector in the helmet. You got an adequate sensation of seeing a 3D world, but if you turned your head it would take 0.25 seconds for your view to catch up. It was unconvincing, disorienting and nauseous.
So most of us wrote off VR, and the world moved on.
I'd argue that, largely due to the gaming industry, we're now long past the technological barriers that broke VR back then. Hardcore PC gamers insist on crazy framerates for games like Quake, so you can now buy commodity hardware that could present beautiful 3D worlds as a stereo pair on two displays as 120FPS without breaking a sweat.
Nintendo has demonstrated that it can deliver an affordable, small, 3D (or 6D if you agree with Sony that pitch/yaw/roll are extra) position sensor, with a gamer-friendly response time (I don't know how fast, but the point of the sensor bar rather than using lightgun technology is to get a response time of 1/60 s)
And finally, LCD colour screens have come of age.
I have doubts about this article - most people prefer to sketch on a 2D piece of paper than make 3D clay models. But I do think it's about time VR got a second chance.
Of course, it's nonsense to say "the interface is too clumsy" or "it's impractical". The early adopters and a whole bunch of their friends are already there and doing just fine. If you think a keyboard can't handle graceful movements, you've never been aced in Unreal or Tribes by somebody who's shooting you from over there one second and kicking you ass from over there, the next. All while doing a victory dance and providing a running commentary on your p0wnage.
No, the interface is pleny rich, but of course it's going to get better.
And I'd be careful of thinking that the "fully immersive encounter suit might be the end game". There are those that thought that animated gifs would be the end game, too. "Someday, we will even have on-demand delivery of music on the internet. Maybe even video!". All whilst many of use are downloading The Departed via bittorrent, and the Goth-Rock boxed set, while watching The Daily Show via YouTube. Be very careful when thinking you can envision an "endgame".
You are welcome on my lawn.
The only thing VR glasses will usher in is the era of the Pukeverse.
Opencroquet
It is stunning, biggest drawback is needing openGL which for the life of me I can't get going under Linux. Thus I have only tested on win2k where it is great. Download and try it, it is smalltalk based. It is built for decentralised use. It is very scaleable. It also does not like NATs so thats is a slowing point.
It is probably not going to change the world this week, but once more people are working on it and it gets around NAT and if openGL was not so critticle then I am sure lots linked up worlds would start happening.
Words can not describe it properly, you got to try it. Have a look at the demo videos of interactions. Technically it scores well mostly because so little bandwidth is required for people to share worlds, it does require half decent machines for the computations but anything in the last few years is good enough (ie in the GHz range)
This is my sig, exciting huh!
A little bit of searching brings Abnet - ABNet uses a Java Communications server with Javascript to turn a single-user VRML / X3D world into a Multi-user Virtual World environment. With a BSD style licence.
http://kimballsoftware.com/downloads.html
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Too expensive to develop for free -> dead before it's even invented.
there isn't that much data on the web that would benefit from being presented in 3d anyways, so there will be no force driving the web forward to use it as a broad medium anyway, look at books.. they have been around ( the concept ) for hundreds of years and no one has come up with a better way to do it yet... eReaders are just the new books, they change naught about presenting the text. there are also things that benefit greatly from being presented in 3d ofcourse, and coincedently, there already are plugins/viewers for that kind of data readily available as already mentioned somewhere above.. behold, the furture is here... the web in 3d? where it makes sense it already happened.. years ago
...this terrifying thought. MySpace in the Metaverse. Need I say more? -Zen
Do You Experiment?
...this terrifying thought.
MySpace in the Metaverse.
Need I say more?
-Zen
Do You Experiment?
I don't know, I have played around with it a lot and to me it seems like SecondLife v0.0.1
Finkployd
MySpace in 3D
'Nuff said
Actually, the first thing I thought of was Flash. It is the single most annoying thing a web developer can do to a page. Anything with flash is likely to be very short on content. I can imagine that anything in 3D will be even longer on eye candy and shorter on substance.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's called VRML and it was a miserable failure.
why dont these people get it in their heads that most of the public is not interested in reading morning news in a 3d manner, they want a nice smallish tablet that is easy to use, does not require charging every 20 minutes and is always on to view it in the form it is presented right now.
3d for conveying basic information is useless and cumbersome. It's great for medical, engineering and chemistry, but for regular joe it sucks.
VRML proved that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Thanks for reminding me. I downloaded the sources once and tried to compile it. Its a pity that netbsd and ubuntu (the two platforms I use) don't have it in their package collections.
One question which I can't find an answer to on the web site is about the distinction between client and server in Croquet. Does every node have to have a UI? The reason I ask is that my server runs all the time which is desirable if you want to publish an environment. My workstations are laptops and tend to come and go.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Browse the internet to go on www.ibm.com. Search for drivers ? Old fashioned !!
... memories of ShadowRun with a sadistic GM
The future is:
Connect to the new 3D virtua-net. Go to the nearest NetTube station next to your ISP building. Take the first Alphabetical Northbound metro on the COM line. Stop at station "I". Walk outside and take the NetBus to IBM Netplex. Ask politely the receptionist for the support area (Otherwise you will get kicked out by the security officer). Walk to the right departement (Hold SHIFT key to run), take the box with updated driver and bring it home. ( Check the driver is in your inventory before leaving )
Ah
If everyone was allowed to run their own sim, sl would have now many times more land :). But there would have to be some organisation responsible for sim placement.
Yes, that sounds like one of the major hurdles. How about something like everyone being able to put their virtual land in a big grid that covers the whole landscape, as long as the four landowners adjacent to them agree to this? Then everyone notes their adjacent four computers' IP addresses, and it should be almost seamless for an avatar to move from one person's land/server to another person's, all without anyone having to pay for the right to use a server because they run their own.
Of course, you'd still need someone to write a free (libre) server in the first place, and the open protocol spec complete with RFC. But I'm sure all of this is possible, just very hard and time consuming to set up in the first place.
There is the kitchen, the living room, the study, the bathroon, the bedroom, perhaps a cellar, maybe an attic, and the garage.
Now think of all the cupboards you have in each room ... from kitchen to garage, and then think of all the different objects you have somewhere in those cupboards. Say that you have perhaps 20-odd cupboards in total. Now I bet you have a fair idea of what's in each of those cupboards.
Now suppose I asked you to find: something to clip your toenails, something to saw a piece off a broomstick, and something to hold a hot dish from the oven.
Chances are that you know if you possess a dedicated toenail clipper, where to look for it if you do, and that you'll look for a good pair of scissors if you don't possess a dedicated toenail clipper. And you probably wouldn't look in the cellar or the attic for it. Same thing for something to saw a piece off a broomstick. You probably wouldn't look in the bathroom (unless that's where you left your toolkit).
My point is that you are able to organise a large amount of information in your own head, and retrieve it very efficiently in this 3-D environment called your home.
Now imagine that you had this virtual home. You also have a conventional search-engine for that home, but it will look only for specific objects.
Now I have formulated my questions so that you won't be able to directly use a search engine ... you have associate the object with the functionality first, only then can you let a conventional search-engine look for it. But that first step requires quite a lot of knowledge on your part. In your home you would probably know immediately, but in a filing cabinet or on your hard-disk??
And even if you didn't know whether you had something that could be used to perform a specific service, you could go into a room and ... rummage for something that would do the job since you would tend to place things with the same characteristics in groups.
And now think of how much you know about the neighbourhood where you live, and perhaps the city you live in. And how easily you can learn and remember the same sort of information for a *new* city or a new home.
In short, I think that you can store and retrieve more information much more easily and effectively in terms of this virtual 3-D environment than in an ordinary set of folders.
After all ... the secret of a good interface isn't that it's efficient for the computer, it's that it's efficient for us.
Remember that we're all descendents of monkeys who depended for their survival on being able to remember where the ripe fruit hung, where the edible roots were, and where they could expect to find some suitable animal to eat, which routes were safe and which not ... etc. etc.. This amounts to lots and lots of information, all organised in a 3-D frame and accessible on demand. How can we possibly learn and remember that much information with such ease? Well ... we all have the facility to do this sort of thing hardwired in.
So why not use this strength?
That's why I would like to have a virtual office in addition to my ordinary computer.
Adobe created a program that would allow users to create a 3D website. It was a great concept, but it did run very clunky like, but I think if they revived it it might work. I downloaded a copy a long time ago and messed around with it. It was pretty basic but I guess they got no support for it cause now its dead.
Can I bum a sig?
the real metaverse will only happen when people have a portal with 3d avatars. instead of a slashdot forum, you'll be chatting with people in a room with infinite exits. In one exit, you'll have a link to City of Villains, where you can just walk in and the game starts loading, and in another exit you'll have a link to WoW or whatever else floats your boat. The ability to then take your avatar from those games and bring them back to the slashdot room is also something that's needed.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
They didn't say anything about pr0n. What good is a 3D web with no impact on pr0n?
Clearly this Cox person is clueless.
I have spent the last 5 years researching information visualization, recently gettinging into immersive (glasses, multi-wall, etc) visualization, and I can say without hesitation that his primary arguement holds no water whatsoever for most tasks relevant to computer users. "three dimensions, even virtual dimensions, are so much better than the two we experience on our monitors today" The problem is that the author makes no case for *why* this is. I don't want to get too far into the weeds here, but a fundamental concept of design is to strip abstract away irrelevant material (noise) to leave that which is important (signal) for the user. He is suggesting moving from a paradigm of 1 dimension (text is 1 dimensional, not two) and moving to four dimensions (time is as relevant as place when you start dealing with avatars, VWs, etc) The human perceptual system doesn't really work that way. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors left us with a hybrid 1D/2D ability, with limited capacity to perceive or reason in higher dimensionality. If we look at information absorbtion, we can do very well with 2d in the form of pictures, maps, etc, but if the story being told doesn't lend itself to that medium, then we are 1-dimensional learners. Reading and speaking are our primary communication mediums for complex ideas and they are completely linear. (time) It boils down to complexity. A virtual world adds unneeded complexity to simple phenomenon. (social networking, productivity applications, etc) Value is derived from making information MORE accessible, not less accessible in a prettier way.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
http://www.activeworlds.com/
Done years ago.
"Well guess what, everyone? The way we've been doing things up until now is completely wrong and this is how we're all going to be doing it in the future!"
Do these fools have no concept of the merest possibility that *JUST MAYBE* some of the stuff the human race has invented over the years has been pretty much refined to the best it can be, works as it is and therefore doesn't *NEED* to change?
For example, I think it's pretty safe to assume that wheels will always be round, that we'll probably always represent information as combinations of characters from an alphabet and that writing information on one or more sheets of near two-dimensional material is a pretty good way of storing and carrying information without any reliance on external power or much risk of mechanical breakdown.
I have a myriad of friends and work colleagues, most of whom are technology geeks, but I've yet to hear any of them clamouring for "more Internet worlds" or "the 3D Web" - most of them seem to spend a lot of their time nattering on about the fun they're having on World Of Warcraft.
If people are looking to the future, then they are probably looking forward to far more important things like a cure for cancer or world peace. Let's face it, 95% of the computer users in the world put up with a bloaty operating system without complaining about it, so why do they care about this stuff?
I really think it's about time that Slashdot stopped posting articles because some fat pig in a skyscraper somewhere thinks he's clever enough to dress up an advertisement for something pretty bloody bland and uninteresting into a "Here's what's coming next" psuedo-technology discussion.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Photoshop or Microsoft Word
Probably not, when you are editing 2D images or text which is inherantly 2 dimensional. But think beyond making pictures and text and yeah, it is out there.
so why should it for online applications
Because a lot of us are interested in things that aren't pictures and text. Simple example, a DNA molecule marked up in VRML (although, I hope to God they come up with a better markup language, I learned VRML in high school and yea, it isn't pretty) with metadata (text, images) drawn from the web (our current internet). That would make excellent use of a 3D interface with 2D support material interleaved. That's just a simple example. Another one is distributed simulation (either real work, or something like a MMORPG...)
Check out the interverse:
http://www.interverse.org/
It's free as in speech and has many of the capabilities of the metaverse. I had high hopes for the project but it looks like it's on stand by now. Cool development project anyone?
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
I refuse to take the author seriously because he/she used the following words together in one paragraph...
Forces
coalescing
repercussions
transformation
cliched
virtual
cinematic
compelling
and lastly but not in the paragraph but the title
Metaverse
I was surprised we didn't see paradigm thrown in there as well!
The year was like, 1997 (I know, I was trying to teach myself in high school). We were all still in dialup. That was half the problem right there. The other problem is the language isn't that great. VRML proved nothing, it was before its time. Ubiquitous broadband, faster computers with hardware acceleration, we are now at the point in time where if 3D makes sense as an online platform, said platform will emerge.
"Come on now ... 3D web is very appealing, and we are starting to get the tools to work with these, but as long as we have the trusty mouse and keyboard, navigation in a 3D realm will always be awkward."
Well one thing people are forgetting is that the "trusty mouse and keyboard" have changed over the years.
"Also there is the production costs involved with making such things."
They're called games.
Yah and like that really took off in a big way. This article seemed interesting until he mentioned that the so-called "metaverse" is merely vaporware at the moment.
Also, he seems to ignore the fact that VR headsets have real usability issues that anyone with any common sense would immediately realize. For instance, are you going to go into your VW (Virtual World) while on a train or subway to work, or will you just use your laptop or cell phone to communicate.
Even more important, if the "Web 2.0" buzzword means anything, it is that users now want to be able to create their own content as they see fit, rather than merely selecting an avatar and running around to "chat". If you want a more realistic experience than simply chat with someone else on the internet, then you hookup a webcam. If you want to parade around in fantasy land, well then there are the MMORPG's.
In addition, if I had a nickel for every 3D chat program I have seen over the years (not including games like EQ, WoW, and the Sims Online), I would be a dot com billionaire by now. The virtual reality cyberworld is nothing new, and all of the VW's that I have seen over the years have the same thing in common in that people find it kind of cool to mess around with for a few hours, but then they quickly lose interest as running around with a 3D avatar doesn't really accomplish anything productive. Once the novelty wears off on users, the 3D platform of the month goes the way of the dodo bird.
Last but not least, 2D interfaces are fast to interact with while 3D interfaces (or every single one I have seen) are inherently slow. 3D interfaces have potential uses in the future with respect to surgical operations and any task that requires manual control of mechanically operated tools, but other than that users will automatically prefer a simple 2D interface to running their standard applications over 3D interface since navigating a 3D virtual interface is a lot more work than a lot of technology pundits realize.
All in all, this article read more like a Microsoft press release for some upcoming software product that has yet to even seriously get into the planning stages, than anything worth posting on Slashdot.
It's another attempt at linked 3d worlds. It's based on the Crystal3d engine and looks a little quake3-ish but it does work, is fast and the tools to build worlds are already there. I had very high hopes for this project but the last update was January of last year. So I suppose the developers got tired of developing it without support. Anyone wast a cool 3d programming project?
The site is here.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
I don't think it needs to be free at all. Internet access isn't free. If this thing has value, it will not be free.
Sure, basic access may be free, but you'll have a B&W or stick-figure avatar, and everyone wo sees you will assume you're a junkie at a street terminal, looking to contaminate them with a computer virus.
Anything worthwhile is worth money.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
"It would be next to impossible to convince a non-technical person to virtually walk through a filing system to find their work when they could just browse to it normally without the 3D stuff."
I borrowed the above to illustrate a point. Even when discussing the future one can't let go of the past. Why would a future computer even have the concept of a filing system? Future computers may be browsing something a lot more abstract than files and folders, if they have browsing at all?
Snarky kids put copyrighted material on internet for free download, get bought by search engine for 1.7 billion dollars. check.
... where can I line up to get my wheelbarrow filled with VC cash?
the term "metaverse" used on slashdot. check.
so
I don't want to miss out this time!
The windows are all in the same *plane* but they most definitely do have a Z value, otherwise overlapping windows wouldn't work. We do a non-perspective corrected projection through Z to get the final 2D display picture. It's not 2D and it's not 3D (which I think would be persepctive corrected). So how about 2.5D?
I don't think NCSA mosaic was touted using such crap marketspeak - it was just so good the potential was obvious (I remember first using and thinking "this is the next big thing".) It didn't need lots of "paradigm shifting" type reviews.
Furthermore, I don't think this will ever take off until an Open Source server is available. There must be a free market to develop on the platform. If we didn't learn anything from the Amiga/Macintosh vs IBM PC story then we should've learned this. Closed platforms widespread use do not make. No company in their right mind would dedicate all their E-Commerce hosting to ONE provider with no alternative choice.
Ever since I saw VRML back in the mid ninties It thought this was where everything was going to head eventually - given the right video cards. I still think it will eventually. The thing is, we need a good general 3d pear to peer hosted open source platform to build the next web. If you want to have a full 3d world of your own it could be hosted on your own system. IPv6 will make this even easier.
There are already several open source projects trying to accomplish this, the Interverse project being one of them (btw, this avatar chick is hot.) As well as the VRML stuff from the mid-ninties.
BTW, I'm not affiliated with the Interverse project, I just think it's cool. Anyone know anything else similar?
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
The idea that somehow it is more useful to work in 3D is of tremendously limited imagination. When you look at a service like housingmaps.com, the user is well above 6D - from maps, descriptions, categories, distances from work, home, schools, major roads etc.... Frankly a "3D" virtual environment to navigate would add tonnes more irrelevant shit, jack up computing and programming investment like crazy, and bog down the user. There are better ways to organize than simulating a gravity constrained human experience.
Metaverse is for losers, even if some losers are cool.
Did anyone else read this and think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Let's hope that the kids never discover the secret of Dip!
does a good job of making the case for the evolution to a 3D web
/.er.
As other readers have already commented, the web is already multi-dimensional. TFA is actually referring to the user interface, not the web itself. I already use a couple of 3-d interfaces, namely Google Earth and NASA World Wind. For the type of information they display, the 3-d interface is wonderful. In fact when using plain old Google Maps I often attempt to treat it as a 3-d interface and am frustrated when I realize my mistake. Displaying maps is, of course, just the beginning. Much information is better illumined when put into a geographic/chronologic context. Imagine taking all the biographical information in Wikipedia and using a Google Earth type interface to follow someone through their life. It would be easy to cross-reference to other famous people who they met / worked with along with the historical context. World Wind already does this sort of thing for climatic info. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm as excited about a 3-d user interface as much as the next
But...for most information, a 2-d interface is always going to be better. Why? Because thats the only way to display everything without hiding anything. The problem isn't technical it's visual. I'll use an analogy from Art. For thousands of years artists have both painted and sculted, but the 3-d technology (sculpting) has remained niche. Sculture has been mostly used for portrait/figures, while painting has been used for everything else. I can't think of a single sculpted landscape. Why? I'll posit that its because it's poor medium for portraying a broad sweep of information. Even when its used, such as dioramas in a Museum, it necessarily shows a very narrow slice of reality. 2-d is an excellent way to avoid clutter and present information in an easily understood way. Sometimes we even prefer to go 1-d such as timelines to distill the information even more.
This is inaccurate. In addition to employing tail elevators to control pitch and wing ailerons for roll, airplane pilots utilize foot rudders to control yaw on the normal axis. This is necessary for both inline flight adjustment and to compensate for the reduced lift vector and increased aileron drag forces while turning. All planes can roll without changing direction by using a combination of input controls; the counterexample of turning without rolling is as simple as applying left stick in coordination with right rudder to counteract the roll.
Coordinated flight requires simultaneous adjustments across all three axes. Learning to visualize, plan and control your movement in arcs across all three dimensions is one of the greater pleasures of flying -- go watch some aerobatics shows, or even try out a free starter lesson in a local gliding club to experience this pleasure firsthand.
and how it's wired- as opposed to the strength of the machine-- where the strengths of the machine and their application can overpower any fractional improvement of using a system tailored to my 3-d perceptions.
option 1- use a fuzzy skillset of mine to have an 'idea' of where something is
option 2- use a precise and complete strength of the machine (bit by bit searches)
I can likely use a 3d imagery as you suggest- to poke around where I left something (i think)
using my strengths and a 3d model
or I can arrange to have search the ENTIRE FREAKING HOUSE every time I want to look for something, and do something else in the meanwhile.
At work- I have a great duplex scanner, it ROCKS, it cost more than I wanted to spend at the time, but it converts everything to pdf- scanned for ocr...
now, if I want to, I can open windows search, set it to my 'scanned' folders and type in 769.45 (look inside the file)
it'll take 5 minutes to search all 6 gb of records for 2006.
But I'll get every document that has that figure- an delivery slip for some products, an invoice for those items to be paid, and a copy of the bank statement where it was paid...
and I can do something else for five minutes, something the computer can not do.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
And from what I've read, this is a common problem for women. Probably related to the fact that women see more detail than men do, on average - we can differentiate between more colors, we notice more of the objects surrounding us. It's also an issue for older people, who tend to get vertigo much more easily than people in their early 20s. That adds up to only a minor problem for the producers of 3D games, but a MAJOR roadblock for anyone trying to sell a 3D web browser.
Maybe in a generation or two, as people grow up more and more immersed in technology, the differences will fade. But not in the next couple decades.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
The analogy suggested by the TCS Daily article suggests that what is needed is not another metaverse portal 'gaming world', but rather a new model of 'browser' that renders the existing internet into a 3D experience. A browser that has markup language extensibility allowing people and companies to append 3D tags to existing internet services.
Odd that the author didn't mention Active Worlds http://activeworlds.com/ that already has the features claimed for Multiverse. In fact, the two look remarkably alike. The only significant difference I see is that Multiverse http://multiverse.net/ seems to use higher-resolution graphics.
Active Worlds has one advantage in that you can download the client and visit all the worlds as a "tourist" without registering or paying any fees. This makes it more like the original Netscape than Metaverse, which requires registration and even then limits your travel to a "demo world".
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
I cannot even imagaine what type of idiots make this their "home". the crude visually insulting landscape is one thing. But who wants to live in a world using only 1 of your 5 senses.
Don't complain too much about buzzwords :) They make this business run, if you didn't notice.
Okay, I'm confused. What's the antecedent for "this?" Which business? The business that caused this buzzword-laden FA to be forced onto the world?
Buzzwords are stupid, and they make no business run but marketing. All marketers should kill themselves. Really. They do nothing but pollute the universe and cause people to start using words like "utilize" instead of "use," "impact" instead of "affect." That's just plain stupid, and makes the writer/speaker sound stupid.
Oh, I'll complain about buzzwords all right. The first time I read a document from a marketer that said, "We will help you utilize your creative for maximum impact," I about shat gold nuggets. This is the ultimate effect (or "impact," for those of you who don't know the words "affect" and "effect") of a marketing society: sentences that mean nothing, and are written as bad poetry for the sake of hawking something. Usually, buzzwords are used in place of real content to hide the fact that there is no content, or that the writer/speaker has no clue about the content, but wants to make money off you anyway.
Buzzwords are a sign of ignorance. They make no business run, except marketing. If you are in marketing, please: kill yourself. No, really. It'll be a mercy killing, in that you will be showing mercy to the rest of us.
(Please note: marketing is not advertising. Advertising is the art of informing citizens of your product or service, hopefully in an amusing, not-to-obtrusive fashion. Marketers are annoying advertisers, who use whatever trick they can to get you to purchase whatever it is they are hawking. You know the kind. They will go to your boss, or your bosses' boss, if they think they are going to lose the sale.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Imagine how much more useful your computer experience would be if you were able to design a virtual office as large or complex as you needed, and reach anything in it without leaving your chair.
I have heard this assertion before and I still don't see any validity to it. Maybe I'm missing the vision. Maybe in 10 years I'll look back at comments like this one I'm writing and say, "What was I thinking?!" Maybe, so, but I just don't understand how a 3D desktop experience will offer me any improvement to productivity. While it is true that we live in a 3D world, most of what we do is 2D in nature. For example, writing on a piece of paper is a very 2D experience. A desktop top (real world, not computer) is a fairly 2D environment for most people. When I'm typing a paper, I don't want the paper to be in perspective on my computer. I want it to fill the screen. I don't need to see fake avatar hands writing the paper out. This is great for video games, but not for actual productive work.
Also, I don't need an avatar to communicate. I enjoy playing WoW. But even on WoW I don't need the avatar to communicate with someone. Rarely am I even looking at the people I'm talking with. No, I believe that phone calls and email work just fine. If I need to interact with the person directly, then I can video conference.
I really feel that people who push for the 3D GUIs fail to stop and think about whether there is any usefulness to this technology they keep tauting. I am of the belief that they do not. People think 3D is cool and want to be in Johnny Mnemonic I guess.
The mouse was not very popular back in the command line days. Once we went 2D with windows, buttons, menus, scrollbars, and all the other GUI components that are now standard the mouse became a standard input device. We now have mice with multiple buttons and scroll-wheels to help us quickly navigate the 2D conventions that have developed. (The scroll-wheel is a baby-step toward adding another axis to controllers.)
In order for 3D to become readily accepted, there needs to be an evolution in the input devices as well. Logitech has some interesting devices (http://www.3dconnexion.com/products/3a.php), and there are others. Once the early adopters of these 3D environments move toward using true 3D input devices, I think we'll see folks start to understand the potential of a 3D computing environment.
- Jasen.
Is already half done... but its called Croquet
l
http://www.opencroquet.org/about_croquet/faqs.htm
The other free software project trying to do this is VOS/Interreality (I'm a developer on that). No relation to Interverse, though it also uses Crystalspace.
http://interreality.org/
Last place I worked, my cubie was right in the crossfire of a major skirmish most of the time.
h at-shoots-rubber-bands/
http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/01/19/a-gatling-gun-t
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Its called CyWorld
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyworld
Or the predecessor of gopher? Your fucking mom, bitch. Sit down and shut the fuck up.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I too would, in theory, love the concept of a 3D virtual world within my 3D living world. However, people seem to forget what makes the Internet a human achievement and not a day-old fad.
The Web is what makes the Internet an achievement. First-person shooter games are not on the Web, nor are any other games outside of time-passing flash. Outside of interactive diagrams, nothing on the Web will be 3D any time soon for one simple reason and one simple reason alone.
As a civilization, we don't communicate in 3D. In fact, most of us communicate in 1D -- speech. You can add pictures to your documents, and you can hit that big 2D. But when was the last time that you built a physical model for a presentation? I'll bet that outside of high-school, fewer than 2% of the population have any need to so such a thing.
So, I'll say this: until humanity begins to communicate with 3D materials for information transfer, it won't happen. And by the way, 3D is not more efficient for information transfer. Text is text. The days of TextArt are limitted to your grade-8 book report.
As for actual 3D materials -- like architectural models, product showcases, and zoology -- the needs are so very different from one field to another that you just won't get a language which both spans a large enough market and also is efficient to use.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The only way that 3D can be a benefit to productivity and multitasking is if it is completely immersive in a holodeck like fashion. If you could pop up websites to the left and right, or open up a view of the solar system that fills your entire field of vision 360 degrees then it would benefit in almost any environment. *In reality the bridge in start trek should have had a rotational 3 dimensional view of everything around the ship. When you pipe your 3d through a two dimensional element (Your monitor), you lose any advantage it offers. The only way a metaverse will develop is through existing 3d constructs such as MMORPGS and other realms like Second Life. It may take some people away from things like IRC and IM programs, but there will likely still be a place for those. IM programs and IRC are convenient, quick to load and easy to use while you're surfing the web, writing code and reading slashdot.
Yes. All three degrees of freedom are independently controllable. For visualization: how else would it be possible to fly straight in a crosswind?
Maybe it just won't happen the way you think it will. Obviously, the idea of having 3D webpages seems rather silly. VRML was a flop. Yet, large MMORPGs are quite successful and addictive. It's possible such games will expand in the future until they become a more central part of the general "internet experience".
In other words, it's unlikely that you'll get to your PC one morning, update to Firefox 3, and instantly see slashdot in 3D. But it could happen that at some point, more and more people create virtual locations in large scale MMORPGs. Companies could decide that they want some "corporate presence" and the likes... And the environment would only expand, to possibly one day replace the "web" as we know it.
Now if I could only get my Lawnmower started!
Within a desktop 3D view (ala "Desktop VR"), such representations don't make much sense. But in a situation where you have (near) perfect immersion, it can sometimes mean the difference between getting work done and falling down (literally). Unfortunately, HMDs which offer this experience are few and far between, and cost many $$$ (second mortgage kind of money). Ideally, you want (at miniumum) QSXGA resolution (2560 x 2048) and 60-70 degrees horizontal/45-50 degrees vertical field-of-view coverage - so that the FOV extends outside your peripheral vision area, and still maintains a pixel-per-degree ratio that doesn't put you in the "legally blind" category (although, even at QSXGA resolutions, you are still likely nearsighted). BTW, as far as I know, no one manufactures such an HMD.
Honestly, for real work, I can see augmented reality (using a see-through HMD) as being much more functional for the day-to-day working world, and it also wouldn't hinder the use of a real keyboard/monitor combination for regular 2D work. The ability to have virtual representations of data in 3D floating around you in your workspace, while simultaneously using a regular keyboard and monitor, seems like it would have some practical uses in the real-world.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I never realized there were so many flat earthers on slashdot. We didn't -need- color when monocrhome was good enough, and then why bother going beyond EGA? It let you do all the colorful pie charts and graphs you might want for your business activities. VGA is pretentious and pointless...why would we need a graphical browser when LYNX works just fine to get the information you need. Why do computers ever need to make sound? (this is one I got from my mom)...nevermind 5.1 surround sound...that's moronic. How can you navigate in a 3D world with a mouse and keyboard? Impossible! (boom headshot! pwned!) I'm not wearing those stupid glasses. Broadband? For what purpose?? More porn? No program should ever need more than 640k of memory. FYI you can still look at a flat screen in the metaverse and the whole WWW fits on it, tabs and all. Ain't that something. Seeya there in a few years. I'll be the big red dragon flying overhead while you rotate in place trying to figure out the controls to move.
Ok, let me clarify. Most of our informational interaction with the world is 2D. We read 2D books. We look at 2D pictures. We write notes to our friends on 2D pieces of paper. We put magnets on the 2D surface of the fridge. We write research papers on 2D surfaces. So much of how we extract information from our surroundings is very two dimensional.
I think there has been a lot of focus on Second Life and MMORPG's. I've experienced both and have found many of the critiques to be accurate. They all fulfill the entertainment aspect (except Star Wars Galaxies) however even Second Life does not currently produce something that serves the functional needs of computer users. However they are a great step forward in developing the technology.
Several people have mentioned hand held computers/cell phones. That will be the key along with GPS development to Augmented Reality, which mixes 3D worlds with the real world. There we will have the internet overlaid on top of our regular day to day world. In a capitalist model this could provide us with a dinner menu as we walk to our restaurant, as well as huge 3D arrows pointing us to our location. In vehicles, as it already exists, it could provide us with critical traffic data including being able to see the outline of a car through a building, before it runs a red light and hits us. The examples of it's uses seem endless to me already.
This type of technology really depends on a movement away from the mouse, screen, and keyboard. It's a move back to what is natural to most people, walking, talking, and gesturing. Even coding could be developed so that one only needs a pair of glasses and gloves (and hopefully the dork and price factor on the glasses will drop in the next 4 years).
Sincerely
End Number 15
All glory to the Hypnotoad!
Guess I'll have to dust off my old katana.
"I know together we'll make the possible totally impossible" - Homme
As many of us know already, after you add Multiverse to the list of sources for apt and you still can't find the package you are looking for, the next step is to compile it yourself.
... Tomorrow it will be flying cars and cold fusion... You know, just around the corner.
If the Metaverse is ever to take off, they need to dump the assumptions that came out of cool science fiction stories (3D, avatars, etc) and think about what extensions of the existing web would be useful, and how MAYBE that might take advantage of some useful elements of the original SciFi metaverse vision.
Yes, I WOULD like a better way to organize my virtual office. Remembering all the paths to every file (for a command line interface) is impossible - I end up searching or reading through a bunch of directories or using auto-complete and guess. Exploring graphical lists of folders isn't much better - often slower. I'd prefer to quickly and smoothly zoom in and out and pan around over a 2D surface on which I've grouped my documents and other things. Most should be simple rectangles with file names - too many icons (2D or 3D) and it becomes chaotic and impossible to see anything.
Then let me use simple cues like color and size - with most of those cues set automatically - to let me find things even faster. E.g. more recent documents would be larger by default - but to see older files, I only need to zoom in a little further. I could lasso a group of documents, creating a colored background blob around them, so I can spot a particular project in an instant. And not just documents - email, saved game states, my web favorites, live video feeds, songs, etc.
When I want to "open" a particular document, I click on it and it's rectangle updates to show the contents at a reasonable window size. Double click and it snaps to full screen. Hit the ESC key, and my view pops back so it's just another item.
Since I might need to pull documents from many locations for a project, but I don't want to mess up my storage view, I'll want to be able to set an anchor point that I can snap back to with one keypress, pulling along and depositing links to any documents I've selected or opened. Hit that key again and I snap back to where I just was, to get a link to a file I forgot to bring along.
And that's just my "desk" - I also want websites organized this way. When I'm browsing, I'd still go to home pages by clicking links - but at any time I can click a "whole site" icon and pop into a space representing the whole website - and if the site's creators have done a good job it'll quickly be obvious which area I want to zoom in on. And now a link to a whole site would actually take me to the web-space, instead of a home page.
Then there should be views which are essentially collections of links to documents that can reside in any storage space. E.g. collegues could set up shared view spaces for collaborative work. Usually the closest thing to "avatars" would pop-up when a collegue comes into a shared workspace, or wants my attention for a few quick text messages or a voice call.
I remember when webpages first started cropping up. I'm not even talking graphics. I was using links or whatever text based web browser was there at the time, as I only had a shell account. It sucked me in. All of these different "sites" I could go to, files to download, things to play with - it was great. Recently A friend told me about secondlife, which, for all intents and purposes is a metaverse not a distributed one, but whatever. I tried it out, and was bored off my ass. There's no "wow" there. Without a "wow" factor, it's pretty useless. Also, it's more difficult to interact w/ computerlike things there. I don't want to have to use a monitor in my monitor. Sure, yes, you could switch back and forth, but if you're doing that you're taking the features out of the metaverse. I dunno. If it succedes there are going to be several in between steps, I think.
-nick
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
When will people realise that the reason we have 2D boxes that can be dragged around on top of each other is NOT because we can't do anything else. Simply put it is the only simple, reasonable way to display text or pictures. 3D content is great, but I'm sure we'd be using 3D operating systems by now if it was a more/equally effective way to work.
/Rant. :-)
And no Aero does NOT count. It may use 3D capabilities (in order to f*ck up an already hugely flawed GUI system) but you still have flat surfaces to read text or whatever from. Even in the future when we have 3D displays, I will still want to read my text of a flat surface, not the side of a sphere or something gay like that.
In summary, I put this into the same bag as an article from the Australian Amiga magazine (I forget what it was even called now) from about 15 years ago. The author believed we were all stuck in an invisible cage by being forced to use such outdated (even then) ideas as folders and documents. Of course the only way to 'improve' on this system would be to call them something else (hey its taken us that long to add a decent search function to the systems we have) but I'm still going to want to find information, and I expect to be able to group similar information. Call it what you want, all you need is windows, folders and files.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.