Theories and Metaphors of Cyberspace- Abstracts

Implementing Gibsonian Virtual Environments

by:

Dieter Schmalstieg and Michael Gervautz

We speculate on the possibilities for a current-technology realization of the ideas about a three-dimensional Cyberspace, as sketched in the novels of William Gibson, and also report on our ongoing prototype implementation of a Gibsonian virtual environment.

Virtual reality research has provided means of conveying multi-sensory information to human participants in real time, while global networks are expanding at a dramatic pace. Both fields together provide the fundamentals for such an effort.

From an examination of the technological principles of a Gibsonian virtual environment, we conclude what properties such an implementation must have. His fictitious world-wide virtual environment is three-dimensional, highly interactive, spatially continuous, multi-user capable persistent, scaleable and democratic. Clearly, a system with such demanding properties cannot easily be extrapolated from existing network paradigms. A new concept is needed, that provides solution to design issues and semantic questions. Once this is done, strategies for implementing the possible concepts can be developed.

An implementation of such a system faces a number of problems in the large and in the small. In particular, the semantics of the virtual environment and its inhabitants must be defined. We attempt to gibe answer to important questions such as:

• How does the environment relate to itself (in the presence of multiple users)? What are the semantics of shared content?
• How do multiple environments relate to each other? How are environments connected?
• What is the structure of the elements that the virtual environment is composed of?
• How do the elements of the virtual environment interact? How can objects live in different virtual environments