Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/fade into you/being there/Issues & Ideas/VMRL/Visions

Text File | 1994-10-01 | 12KB | 260 lines

From [e-mail] Mon Jun 13 22:36:00 1994
From: [e-mail] (Mark D. Pesce)
Message-Id: <[e-mail] >Subject: PHIL:  VRML Visi
ons
To: [e-mail] (vrml)
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 1994 21:38:57 -0700 (PDT)

   VRML List Members:

   I have been working on the development of a VR interface to
   WorldWideWeb for several months. During this period of time I have
   been inspired by what will be possible when _our_ work is complete.
   I'd like to share some of these visions with you, in the hope that it
   will help to formulate the needs for VRML in the short term, and into
   the future.

   We're all approaching this design from different points of view; my
   training has greatest depth in networking and visualization, others on
   this list are architects and designers. Despite differing needs, our
   goals are quite often congruent, and we must strive to develop a
   technology which meets the needs of the vast majority of its users
   without sacrificing elegance or intelligence. Mark Pesce June 1994


     _________________________________________________________________



   Vision One: The United States Holocaust Museum
   When: Now
   The Project:


   The USHM project is a joint development between Husky Labs
   (Washington, D.C.) and the Labyrinth Group to produce a WWW site which
   has both documentary and spatial exhibits. The USHM is a unique
   museum; the architecture of the space plays an important role in the
   story being told. Parts of the Museum look like villages in Eastern
   Europe, a concentration camp, an oven. Visitors to the Museum are
   overwhelmed by the gestalt that is created; that a space can be so
   evocative is one of the strengths of the Museum, and, without it, the
   Museum loses some of its impact upon the imagination and the soul.

   When completed, the Museum will be accessible, as a space, from
   anywhere on Internet, to any WWW client which is VRML-capable. It will
   be possible to "tour" the Museum, just as is done in real space, with
   many links from the virtual space of the Museum into Web pages which
   describe, in greater detail, the content of the Museum's exhibits.

   This project requires very little technology which has not already
   been developed and demonstrated at WWW '94. Our very simple (moronic)
   VRML language (the specification for which is given at the VRML Forum
   WWW site) is capable, with very few extensions, of handling the
   expression of the entire space, with extensive linkages to WWW pages
   to be viewed from Mosaic or another Web/MIME viewer.


     _________________________________________________________________



   Vision Two: The United States Library of Congress
   When: October 1994
   The Project:


   My initial inspiration for the creation of Labyrinth and VRML was to
   develop a way to model the complexity and richness of the Web in such
   a manner that it is intrinsically navigable, without any instruction
   required on anyone's part. I use, as an example, the US Library of
   Congress GOPHER site. It is rich, it is deep, but it is difficult to
   navigate or browse, especially if one is unacquainted with the site,
   or one doesn't know precisely what one is looking for.

   I assert that it is possible to model the Web in three dimensions in
   such a way that it is _intrinsically_ navigable, such that the form of
   an object within a particular space is derived from the content of
   that object. It is possible, then, to build a "library", or data
   repository, which looks only coincidentally like a library in the real
   world; in fact, we are better served if this virtual library looks
   like its content. If we succeed in this, it should be possible for
   anyone, of any age, to browse the collected content of the world's
   greatest library (or as much of it as they care to place on-line),
   without having to be taught hermetic classification systems, searching
   methodologies, and the like..

   At the very least, it is possible to take the GOPHER site
   marvel.loc.gov and "wrap" a VRML interface around it. In so doing, we
   make the Library accessible to people who would otherwise be
   intimidated by a GOPHER interface, and can organize the space so as to
   facilitate browsing and examination of the resources at the site.

   This, again, requires very little that VRML does not already have.


     _________________________________________________________________



   Vision Three: Earth
   When: January 1995
   The Project:


   One of the most inspirational parts of the Web, for me, are the pages
   at the Michigan State University where the Current Weather Maps/Movies
   are kept and maintained. This is a collaborational effort of many
   people at many university sites across the country, and is a trully
   brilliant example of what is already possible with the Web.

   Extending this into the virtual world, I'd like to be able to create a
   real, live "Earth" on my desktop, not unlike the version described by
   Neal Stephenson in _Snow Crash_ (a book full of good ideas), which
   would take the sattelite data, massage it just slightly, and wrap it
   onto a sphere which represented the planet. This is certainly possible
   _right now_, and would be an extremely effective demonstration of the
   combined capabilities of VR and WorldWideWeb.

   Further, one can imagine that this "Earth" simulation can become one
   of the interfaces for NASA's EOS project, the "Mission To Planet
   Earth", which begins later this year, and will result in exabytes
   (10^15 bytes) of cartographic and other ecological mappings of the
   planet. Thus, VRML can be used to create a rich, dense, yet
   easy-to-use interface to what will be the single largest data
   collection task ever undertaken by humanity.

   It has been a long-held believe of mine that VR/Cyberspace represent
   an effective, necessary technology for planetary management. In an age
   where we must always be conscious of our effect upon the surrounding
   environment, we need powerful tools to visualize it, and to track our
   effect upon it.

   Technically, this project is only a little more advanced than those
   which have been described already. It would be useful for VRML to
   incorporate the concept of a "data stream" (something in the works for
   the WWW libraries) so that "real-time" data flows could be
   incorporated into the planetary simulation.


     _________________________________________________________________



   Vision Four: The WorldWide Marketplace
   When: June 1995
   The Project:


   [There is a small, but vocal, minority of people who find the idea of
   commerce on Internet anathema. To these I would ask that they skip to
   the next and final proposal.]

   Many commercial organizations are excited by the possibility of being
   able to offer goods and services through Internet-based channels. In
   fact, it should be possible to create a "space" with a very wide array
   of goods, both physical and more ephemeral, without advertising, (or
   with it, if desired), so that a "marketplace" can exist for trade.
   Moreover, this market need not be (should not be, in my own opinion)
   monolithic, no single Macy's or HSC or what have you, but more like a
   bazzar, with a dense, organic ecology of businesses which work
   together (and are co-located) in order to support each other.

   It might look like a suburban shopping mall, although that will not
   have a great appeal for everyone. It might look more like Marrekesh
   than Minneapolis. It does need to be flexible, though, so that there
   can be a wide availability of goods/services, and so that
   organizations can come and go quickly, as a market need arises, is
   satisfied, and disappears. While cooperation is necessary, any
   monolithic entity which attempts to "own" the entire retail space
   would end only in stifling the diversity of the market. Therefore, it
   has to be possible to create a concatenated "space" which can draw
   from sources (Web sites) all across Internet, and yet can create a
   continuous, regular perception of space. Finally, it all has to be
   integrated seamlessly with other Web-based markets.

   This project is somewhat more complicated than those outlined above,
   as it requires an overall protocol architecture to support a
   distributed description of a virtual space. I have outlined our
   approach to this problem in the "Cyberspace" paper at the VRML Forum
   Web site, and with the innovations described in that work, it is
   possible to create, maintain and evolve a marketplace on the Web.


     _________________________________________________________________



   Vision Five: The Agora and the Senate
   When: March 1996
   The Project


   "The net, the very network itself, you see, is merely a means to an
   end... The end is to reverse-engineer government, to hack politics
   down to its component parts, and fix it." - Joshua Quittner, _WIRED_
   2.06

   One of the great benefits of communications technology is that it can
   create and nurture communities which exist outside of demographic
   bounds. However, demographic communities need to be brought together
   as well, for the purposes of self-governance. VRML can be instrumental
   in the implementation of these systems of self-governance.

   Democracy is founded on the conceptualization of "informed consent".
   This means that you, as a citizen, have a right and a responsibility
   to exercise your franchise based upon the best possible information.
   While the history of politics is the history of disputes about which
   information is "true", "right" or "moral", underlying all of it is a
   understanding that information, in whatever from, from whomever it
   comes, is necessary for informed consent, and informed consent is
   necessary for democracy.

   In America, our founding fathers did not give us a direct democracy,
   at the national level, because no communications infrastructure of the
   eighteenth century could support such a proposition. However, in New
   England, and in several of the other colonies, towns governed
   themselves directly, and rather anarchically, through a system of
   "town meetings", in which all the citizenry could play a role. This
   itself was modeled after systems which evolved in England, and before
   that, in Athens and Rome, where all of the citizens of the state were
   free to participate in the debate on the issues of the day. To them,
   government was a place as much as a process; the area around the
   Senate in Rome contained the Library, a public area for discussion and
   debate, the baths (where more discussion, debate, and deal-making went
   on), and an ampitheatre for speeches.

   If we attempt to augment our own mechanisms of self-governance, we
   will need to look at this model, and adapt its most functional aspects
   to our own methodologies, and create a Senate of our own. This can be
   done with what we have now, and with what we are developing, although
   VRML will have to move toward _complete_ interactivity before it is
   possible to stage a "street debate" complete with an attentive (or
   heckling) audience. Already it is possible to peruse the budget of the
   United States; and the town of San Carlos, California, this week
   announced its own WWW site. We can use VRML to put an attractive
   interface on these gold mines of useful data; that alone is worth
   doing. But further, we can use the Web and VRML to create a "place"
   where democracy can happen.

   That, I believe, is a noble goal, and one worth working towards.


     _________________________________________________________________



   I have shared my visions with you; these projects are possible
   immediately in the future, not in some distant, barely imagined
   cyberpunk evocation. Together we can sculpt the tools which will
   define these worlds, define their behaviors, and allows us all to
   share in each other's creations.

   Thank you.

   Mark

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