> > At 10:28 PM 5/3/95, Neophytos Iacovou wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > I live in Los Angeles.
> > My PPP ISP is in Phoenix.
> > My .html files are on a disk drive in Manhattan.
> > The virtual world I created via HTML is a castle in outer space.
> >
> > Where would you locate *me* geographically?
> >
> > While the idea of cataloguing and listings is useful, let's not limit our
> > options by relying on The Real World as our metaphor.
> >
> >
> > \/0!d
>
> Exactly! Our physical world was here before people... There is one
> primary contiguous object (the earth) populated by sub-objects (sub-realms
> someone called them) that are our cities, houses, rooms, and people.
> This isn't the case in a virtual environment. There is no pre-existent
> world for our individual points of consciousness to populate. The
> individual entities _are_ the virtual world. There is no need to create
> a virtual Earth... and who would create it? Certainly there needs to
> be some standard means of connecting these entities, but it doesn't need
> to be a highway or a landscape or a bright beam of light shooting from
> one entity to another... Also, a means of indexing these entities (realms)
> must exist in order for one to find anything, but that index doesn't
> need to be the underlying organizational structure for a virtual world.
Everyone here has a point. What I'd like to point out is that it is
neither possible, nor neccessary that we choose one method or another.
Whatever is chosen will have its limitations, and shortfalls. The only
thing we have to solve, technically, is how to link it all together.
Using geometry assumes physical size, and physical laws of travel. That
doesn't apply in cyberspace. Using an arbitrary numbering system implies
registration. We already did that when we registered our servers, and we
do that every time we name a file (you can't have two of the same name in
the same directory). Using a virtual earth (exclusively) limits us only
to what is real, and requires that we update the virtual version to
match the real one. It also limits us to just the amount of surface area
on this planet. (This, by the way, is the reason our economy's value
cannot be mapped to the amount of all the gold we have, and so we cannot
exist on the Gold Standard any more.)
We must move past the limitations of the real world. We can map the real
world, and maintain it when we have the time, but that space should only be
a part of the virtual universe of mapping systems and cyberspace. The
more space we allow to exist, the cheaper it will be. So cheap, you won't
even have to tell anyone you're using it. It's yours for the taking!
Cheap, you say? How is someone going to stake out an area and make you pay
to be in it? How do we do it with real estate? We stake out an area, and
we defend it with force. If there's more available than we care to defend,
then it's cheap.
Look at the IP address space problem. If there are no more created, the
big money interests are going to start to force people to give up IP
numbers in order to get new ones to use. The same can be said for fixed
coordinate systems, or real-world mappings.
URLs fit the bill.
---
Andrew C. Esh mailto:[email protected]
Computer Network Technology [email protected] (finger for PGP key)
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Maple Grove MN 55311 612.550.8229 (direct)
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