Sedona room: online tours and 3D spaces

RELease 1.0, Feb 23, 1995

One corner of the third Rumpus Room is lined with eight heavily networked workstations for guided tours. These machines, connected to modems and the Forum's LAN, are outfitted with the suite of Internet tools available across the Forum [network.sup.2]. In addition, they sport demo accounts on major commercial online services, including AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Pipeline (now part of PSI) and AT&T's Imagination Network.

Your Rumpus Room tour guides are Jerry Michalski and Judi Clark. Clark is the owner of ManyMedia, an Internet-based Web, graphics and presentation production studio. She often helps companies understand the Internet and implement its technologies. The guides answer questions and suggest places to look. They also have access to a few specialized Internet client applications, such as Mathsoft's MathBrowser, Ubique's Virtual Places client, WAIS's search engine and - if we can get it to work in Phoenix - VocalTec's Internet Phone.

Three of the eight guided-tour workstations are set aside for Forum attendees to show off their sites, tools and Web prowess. Feel free to show others your organization's presence on the Web or its very cool tools (and please be mindful of the time so that others can do the same). Has your family put up a home page? Are you the next John Gage? Did one of your software engineers put something outrageously funny on the Web? Show them off here!

Next to the guided-tour workstations, America Online and Prodigy show some prototype software. AOL has some new Internet services and Prodigy has its Web-oriented, next-generation interface, code-named P2.

Virtual places galore

The rest of the third Rumpus Room is devoted to virtual spaces. Here you can check out snazzy, 3D-environment design tools from Paragraph; realistically rendered, dynamically assembled spaces from the Community Company; an engrossing new 2D multi-user online service called WorldsAway from Fujitsu Cultural Technologies (debuting at the PC Forum); and an interactive, multi-user 3D environment from Knowledge Adventure Worlds. Compare your reactions to the various approaches. Imagine them linked to each other, or to online documents or movies.

ParaGraph is best known in the US for its handwriting-recognition software. Founder and president Stepan Pachikov got drawn into cyberspace by his son, Alex. Of course, their new mutual interest led to a new software product, Alter Ego, which helps even amateur designers develop 3D spaces - then navigate through them. This software is the first step in a larger project to make a software time machine that will allow Pachikov and his son to travel through history.

With Alter Ego's software tools, it's easy to create a room with windows, tables and doors. Developers can add textures or images to any object and set them in motion - the textures, that is. That's how one might create the effect of clouds passing overhead, or a river flowing past one's point of view. One can then steer through the newly constructed virtual space in real-time. Pachikov can also demonstrate movable objects as well as complex spaces with interconnected, complicated rooms.

The Community Company is a recent startup with the goal of fostering virtual communities of three kinds: geographic, demographic and economic. Its founder, Mark Pesce, has been deeply involved in the standards-setting process for a scene-description language for shared 3D virtual spaces. He and others have recently defined the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML; see Release 1.0, 7/8-94). VRML, which uses portions of Silicon Graphics' Open Inventor protocol, is now well positioned to be the base 3D scenedescription language for the Internet.

At the PC Forum, the Community Company is introducing freeware VRML browsers that run on Windows, Macintosh (PowerPC and 68K) and [SunOS/Motif.sup.3]. (The browsers will be downloadable from http://vrml.wired.com.) In the next couple of months, several large vendors will announce commercial browsers that use the VRML code libraries. As Pesce demonstrates, VRML and HTML documents can interact. You can click on the image of a poster in a 3D room and travel straight to that Web document. Conversely, a Web page could invoke a VRML space.

On the content front, Pesce is involved in projects of the types he wants. A collaborative "community browser" project should lead to a 3D walkthrough of the South of Market section of San Francisco called "Virtual SoMa". Wired Magazine is converting a section of its Web presence, HotWired, to VRML. Other organizations are interested, too, including the Internet Underground Music Archive and several of the online service providers.

Fujitsu Cultural Technologies debuts its online service, called Worldsaway, at this year's PC Forum. Worldsaway builds on the Habitat system that ran on Commodore 64 micros through America Online's predecessor service, Quantum Communication Services (see Release 1.0, 7-93). Although Habitat ran for only a short while in the US, it has been in use in Japan for a long time on the NiftyServe service.