> notion is that you'd only have one "input" portal per room (generally
> -- the mechanism is designed to allow for multiple "anchors", just
> like HTML); any number of sites could bind to that. The trick is that,
> once a user has entered a room via a portal, that portal is now bound
> to the place whence he came -- that way, he doesn't hit the
> disorienting concept that turning around brings you somewhere
> else. It's sort of the 3-D analogue of the Mosaic "back" button.
this not-clear-where-i-link-to portal idea is, IMHO, very good. While
computer-wise, the idea of only one "input" portal per room makes sense,
I am somewhat worried (as you mentioned later in your post) about what
happens when I enter a particular room twice, from different locations.
Since we want navagation to be simple, this presents a problem.
* Suppose I walk into room A from room B; the "input" portal (as you call
it) for room A now points back to room B. Suppose later on in my
explorations, say when I am at room Q, I see that I can go back to
room A. I enter room A, not because I am interested in the contents
of room A, but because I want to get back to room B -- uh oh, no
way back to B from A, only to Q from A. What we need is something
(perhaps at the browser level) that can add directed "out" portals to
room descriptions. Of course, this completely changes the aspect of VR
worlds -- if I enter room A 20 times from 20 different locations, does
room A ever look the same?
It is for this reason that we should consider a more concrete,
well-defined coordinate system. Yes, this would mean a lot of work. But
for the end user (IMHO) a Cyberspace system more parallel to the Real
World(tm) than to the WWW paradigm makes sense.
[[ David Peck http://www.mbhs.edu/~dpeck/ Macintosh Programmer ]]