🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3eo7mo$s...@nntp1.u.washington.edu> t...@u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) writes:
>Piercarlo Grandi <p...@aber.ac.uk> wrote:
>>A somewhat realistic 3D presentation can be used for much more than
>>games; for example as a substitute for Mosaic, as a WWW client. I am not
>>joking -- I often delight in walking around WADs without monsters or
>>after having killed them all, walking back, just to explore them. How
>>much better if objects/actions in the WAD could be linkable to entities
>>outside the WAD.
>
>I briefly thought of seeing if I could make a WAD based on my apartment.
>I was considering moving some furniture around, and wanted a preview.
>Besides, I've always wondered what I'd do if I found a Baron of Hell
>in my bathroom...
>
>--Tim Smith


Take a look at the Virtual Reality Modeling Language Forum (VRML) at:

  http://vrml.wired.com/

and more specifically one particular idea at:

  http://vrml.wired.com/concepts/visions.html

For those who can't access the web, first email me to get info on how you can
and second read the article below which is an extract from the second of the
above links.

Byeee! :)

Ian.

The DHS.


)-------------------- Extract follows........ ------------------------------

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
satelite 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.