> > don't have to register a damned thing, beyond getting onto the Net --
> > just put the stuff up, and it's there. I am absotively, posilutely
> > certain that *any* kind of registration will slow the growth of
> > Cyberspace by an order of magnitude, because the vast majority of
> > people just won't bother.
It doesn't have to be that way though. Take Gopher as an example. People
can setup their server and announce it to whomever they want. While
people are using the server it can be registered by sending email to us
(the Gopher team) or by an on-line form.
The advantage to being registered isn't so much that you can be listed
in the list of Gopher servers. The coool thing about it is that a
server can be placed in a hierarchy - we choose the hierarchy to be based
on geographical location; continent/country/state(province)/city
Something like this will be **very** useful to have. Right now HTML
pages are scattered all over the place. It would be nice if VRML
documents don't fall into the same trap. Putting all VRML documents in
some sort of hierarchy would be nice. As an example, if all VRML
documents were to be placed in a hierarchy based on their geographical
location it would be very easy to use the hierarchy to actually map
VRML to the Real World.
So when I get on a VRplane(VRmonorail/VRBART/.....) from Mpls to the
Bay Area I can use my current knowledge of where things are in the
Bay Area to help me cruise around Cyberspace. I know where I need to
go to find SGI, SUN, Apple, City Lights, the Bison, and Amoeba Records.
On a similar note, if I have no idea what the path is to the UofMn's
VR world, I can save some time by flying into the Twin Cities and
starting my search from there. I can be fairly sure that the UofMn
isn't close to the Antartic Circle.
And for the VR world of Joe Doe's dog house, I can take a quick jump
out of Cyberspace and do something as old fashion as a WAIS search
(or a VERONICA search) for "Joe Doe's dog house".
It is bad when you have to "register" something before others can make
use of it. I agree on this point. But when registration can come at any
point in the life cycle of the VR world it can be a very good thing.
Organization is nice, it lets you find things. Libraries without
organization aren't very useful. Neither are real world cities, and
states, and countries.
Taking a look around the real world and seeing what allows us to
cruise around our current world should teach us a lot of what is
needed to organize our VR world.
> Maybe it will, but maybe that's for the best in the long run. I love the web
> but I have to admit it's just a wee bit tangled. :) If you want to keep a
> shared 3D universe orderly enough to make it useful, you really need some type
> of control. It doesn't have to be central; it could be regionalized to make the
> governing bodies smaller and (hopefully) more efficient.
I agree with this 100%
> > (This is a point of concern I have over the Cyberspace Protocol; I
> > don't understand how it can work without a central authority. But
>
> CP doesn't arbitrate who gets a chunk of cyberspace; it just makes sure that no
> two objects occupy the same space at once and that everybody agrees on who is
> in a particular place at a particular time.
>
> What many people don't realize is that with the HUGE virtual volume CP provides
> there really won't be a need to fight over who gets to be where. All points are
> accessible as quickly as any other in cyberspace...there's no benefits to being
> conventiently next to the freeway or anything like that. :) This is especiallly
> true if we allow spaces to be bigger on the inside than on the outside (which I
I don't agree with this, here is why:
We run a fairly large Gopher server here. Gopher isn't really about any
one particular document format. It is about organizing documents. So,
when we add links to new Gopher servers into our server we always hear
the complaint "why can't I be at the top of the tree"
There is something that tells people that being at the top of the tree
is better than just giving people URL's and letting them place bookmarks
to the URL for future reference.
People don't realize that if their department is "department of
snowball making" that they should be placed under the listing of all
other departments on campus. They don't understand that when people
come to the Gopher server they will be looking for the "department of
snowball making" to be with all other departments on campus.
Well, it comes to the point where you can remove all structured
organization from the "space" (be it the Cyberspace or whatever) or
people must live with the rules of the city planners so that everyone
in the "space" is happy.
You can be sure that once a unified VR world is possible people will be
killing for the prime real estate. Every Mom&Pop store is going to whant
space right next to the MegaMalls. Every start-up software company is
going to want the space next to Apple, IBM, HP, etc etc. Its going to
be viewed like being on the top level of a Gopher server.
> > Hmm. Do people think that this is an interesting topic? If so, where
> > do you think it belongs? I think it's premature, but only a tiny bit
> > so -- I *do* plan on trying to get this technology (or something else
> > capable of making Cyberspace properly contiguous and flexible) in VRML
> > 2.0...
>
> I think it's completely independant of VRML; you just need something like CP
> to make it work. The world descriptiosn carried by CP could be VRML or something
> else entirely.
>
> At this point I'd like to invite anyone else interested in this facet of
> cyberspace (CP and other such issues) to drop me a line at [email protected]. I'd
> like to start a small private group to study this and maybe even try a few
> ideas out to see what happens.
You don't even need something like CP to make this happen. Just grab any
of the current infosystems that are based on a structured hierarchy. And
put all future VRML links, GopherVR links, Hypher-G links, etc etc etc
into the server.
Off the top of my head I can tell you two ways of doing this right this
instance: Gopher and Hyper-G. Both of these infosystems already do the
what is needed for 2D spaces, 3D spaces aren't any more work at all.
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Neophytos Iacovou Distributed Computing Services
University of Minnesota 100 Union St. SE
email: [email protected] Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA