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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."
I agree... I already have that virtual office with stacks of documents neatly organized and the tools to work with them at my fingertips. The tools are icons on my desktop, the documents files in folders. Why the hell does it need to emulate the real world, if the real world is more awkward to manipulate using a 2D device with some buttons?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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!
Why restrict ourselves to three dimensions?
Following a hyperlink can be thought of as navigating along an extra dimension right?
Turn all the words on the web into hyperwords and navigate along as many dimensions as you like: see your selection of text in dimensions of entries in references, in searches, on maps, in blogs or tags and so on.
If you can see a database organized by any criteria, such as by date or alphabetically, why not see any text on a web page by listings in different reference work, like Wikipedia? Why not see a quote listed by all the blogs it appears in?
Any variable, any view can be thought of as a dimension. And having the option to choose which one to navigate along is pretty useful dontchathink?
http://www.hyperwords.net/
...and then there's virtual conferences. Until the avatars can replicate every facial expression and gesticulation, it will be about as useful as a conference call, and significantly less useful than a regular video conference.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
That's what the Xerox Execs said about computers moving to color. And to be honest, they were right that there is very little reason for a business desktop to use color. Sure, it makes the pie charts pretty, but there are enough hash-mark patterns that do the same job.
As for a 3D filesystem being more difficult to navigate, a command-line is still a hell of a lot easier way to navigate our filesystems than point-and-click. I can get anywhere on my filesystem a lot easier and faster using "cd" (esp. with command-completion) than I can by clicking: "My Computer", "C:", "Program Files", "Adobe", etc. Just because a new GUI hurts productivity, doesn't mean that it won't be wildly popular. Yes this applies to the bottom-line-loving suits, too.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
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.
The main problem is that the web isn't two-dimensional, paper is.
Ticker-tape: One-dimensional (you read along).
Paper: Two-dimensional (read along, skip down/up)
MMORPGs: Three-dimensional (move in three dimensions)
Hypertext: non-linear - you can jump from the middle of one document to the middle of a completely different document.
Hypertext is effectively omni-dimensional, limited only by the number of links the author chooses to put in the document (and, increasingly, by the number of browser extensions, AJAX goodies, javascript favelets/bookmarklets, etc) that use the current clipboard selection or source of the page you're reading and offer you even more navigatioal options.
The web is multi-dimensional, not just two or three.
This is why everyone predicting "the death of the web" in favour of some "better" 3D option has always been wrong. Every time. (Anyone remember VRML?)
3D games won't kill hypertext, because a clunky "spatially-based" interface to a three dimensional world (bonus points: realised on a two-dimensional interface device!) is already worse than the effectively infinitely-dimensional system we're currently using.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Anyone that has to support a user base that has difficulty navigating to a folder on a file server to find a document would appreciate this. Imaging telling your user, "go down the red hall to the third door on the left. Go in, and grab the box marked . Take it back to your desk and work on it. Put it back when you are done."
You're right, there are areas where 3D doesn't make much sense. But as a file manager I think it might work reasonably well. Picture something like this:
A file is a solid column. The shape of the base tells you what type of file it is - triangle for regular file, square for block/char device, hexagon for socket/fifo, etc. The height of the column (log 2) tells you the file size. The texture of the column tells you the detailed file type (MIME type?) - movie, text, html, whatever. The color tells you what permissions you have on that file. (If it's a symlink, it has all those properties but is transluscent.)
Files are in a rectangular room, representing a directory. One wall has a door to the parent directory, the opposite wall has doors to the subdirectories. A third wall has a map of the filesystem on it, with "You Are Here". The last wall has a button on it - hit that button, the wall drops down, and you see the hidden files and subdirectories. The texture of the walls and floor of the room represents the filesystem type - FAT, ext3, SMB, etc. The color of the room tells you what permissions you have on that directory.
You can switch "tools" like in an FPS - maybe a shotgun deletes a file. (See here for an example of this.) Normal WSAD movement, but if you alt-click on something, you 'teleport' to it. So you don't have to walk all the way across a huge directory to get to a subdirectory - if you can see it, you can jump to it.
I've been slowly working on something like this, but I have three kids and one on the way - no time. If anyone wants to implement it, feel free.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!