I am a new member of this list, so my understanding of these things
is still in its infancy. But i have flashes of inspirarion sometimes..
>
> About the inline noise thing. How hard would it be to code it into the
> browser to check for obstacles for that noise. The relative size of any
> obstacles in the path of the noise would diminish the sound volume
> accordingly. The radio itslef would be one obstacle, so the sound would
> appear louder when the user stands in front of the radio. Of course, the
> browser would have to know what side of the radio object is the front.
I work with an object-relational database called Illustra which
has support for 3D spatial objects and queries on them.
If spatial co-ordinates for the object where stored in Illustra,
we could calculate distances, find intersections between paths
and objects, find shortest paths between objects, find shortest
paths between objects _without going though another object_ and
other very cool things.
All this would happen at the server side however. Maybe a mechanism
to send "pass-through" queries about the current scene to an
intelligent server could be found... or the client could have it's
own database engine (hehe.. this is a bit extreme.).