Quote:Original post by Wan

Quote:Original post by Freon Bale
But think of the advantages of a 3D Earth. I challenge you to find and order chocolate from an actual Belgian Chocolatier in Gent, Belgium. You do not speak Belgian, and even with translation software, the amount of effort you will go through to find one and order chocolate is extreme.

On behalf of my southern neighbors: there's no such language as Belgian. [grin]

Good point. Flemish or French. I should have done more research.

Quote:Original post by Codeka

Quote:Original post by Freon Bale
But think of the advantages of a 3D Earth. I challenge you to find and order chocolate from an actual Belgian Chocolatier in Gent, Belgium. You do not speak Belgian, and even with translation software, the amount of effort you will go through to find one and order chocolate is extreme.

It took me about 2 minutes to find this via google. You can't actually order any chocolate, but you can email them if you want - I don't see how a "virtual world" would change any of that, though.

So yes, I can find a chocolatier in Gent, Belgium in a very short amount of time with a purely text-based interface.

I am not saying our current system is non-functional, just highly slanted towards big business with large web presence. You found a chocolatier, but I will bet there are hundreds in Gent. Without even considering my proposal, consider how local knowledge could be harnessed to search for real world venues.

On another level, consider this. In 20-30 years, the quantity of home-bound baby boomers is going to be a huge population in the US. These people will effectively be trapped in their living space. A 3D Earth would give them a window of exploration not just to the Internet, but to the world.

Quote:Original post by mikeman
It reminds me of the system we see in most sci-fi movies, where the user navigates in a 3D environment. It looks cool, but ultimately I really don't think it's very useable. If we are going to substitute the existing system of clicking links, we sure as hell don't want to navigate avatars in 3D environments. First of all,that's 10x harder for the non-gaming people. Believe me when I say, non-gaming people have incredible difficulty with anything 3D, orientation, camera. It doesn't have any advantage. It will definately take longer than what we have today, that is, click on links and hypertext, and that is simply not desirable. The 'pets' idea, that is an interface or a cute cartoony character that exposes functionality, has been tried and didn't work. Personally, I don't see why we should bother with that unless it's for kids. Making an interface cuter doesn't mean it's more useable and efficient. Of course, I don't know, maybe people will prefer it because it looks cooler, who knows. It depends if we value usability or the 'awe' factor. But I really think we should substitute the existing 'dumb' systems with something more minimalistic and smart, like, I don't know, speech understanding, correct language tranlation of pages, understand what the user is trying to search for, things like that.

Possibly my few examples may have convinced you that I am forcing a 3D interface on users. Let me rectify that by saying that in any new system, it is necessary to provide a navigation system that is comfortable to all the groups who will use it. The newest generation of users, children, will find the avatar interface very comfortable, but the older generation will probably still choose to go to a flat page with an empty field that they type a search string. For this latter group, the IA satisfies this need. They are not forced to interact with a pet, but it is there if they want it.

Also, to an earlier point, where I indicated that we would go to Dell's HQ in Texas, it was pointed out that navigating a 3D store would be far less efficient than a web page. I agree. The point I was making was that to FIND Dell's 'site', one could go to where they know Dell actually is. Would this be the only way to navigate there? No, they could have searched with their IA and arrived in the exact same quantity of steps a normal search of today would have yielded.

Quote:Original post by szecs
Or take an example of real life :a library
Is it quite hard and very time consuming to find a rare book by walking between the book shelves, while it's much easier to find it with a search engine, or from a list.
The opposite should be done: every real world (3D) stuff should have a virtual text based interface pair.

And there are a lot of people (like me) who are "blear-eyed" so wont notice things, even if the thing is in front of them.

I agree with you. Searching through objects in 3D space is more difficult than using a list. This is not necessarily my suggestion however.

Consider the library you just mentioned. How would you access the repository of books in your local library? Maybe they have a web site which you can find, but I think it would be easier to type in their address, then click on the building itself. Once clicked, either a 3D rendering of the inside could appear, or just like web pages, an option to view content as lists. If 3D, maybe a user could click on a virtual computer screen with digital cardfile within.

The point is that 3D is the same world that users already live in. What is obvious to do in the real world, should be obvious in the virtual one.

If those small local shops don't have a text-based web presence, why would they have a multi-verse presence?

I'd also like to point out that symbols aren't really universal like you think they are. They do require training. Lets take a good one: the bathroom symbols of a little person, and a little person wearing a dress. Pretty easy to figure out, right? Now imagine that you're a guy from some small country where they've never used little people symbols to mark a bathroom. How do you know that those little people mark a bathroom? What if the women in your culture never wear dresses? Now think about things like stop signs. The only reason you know what a stop sign means is because you were taught what it means. A child with no training wouldn't know that a green light means go or a red light means stop.

Your symbolic interface will certainly work well if it uses a wide set of symbols that people are already familiar with. The question is if you can use such symbols. Also, re purposing common symbols to new, similar virtual functions doesn't always work out well either. After all, Windows has used "Folders" to hold "Documents" forever, and people still have trouble figuring that out.

Quote:Original post by Freon Bale
I am not saying our current system is non-functional, just highly slanted towards big business with large web presence. You found a chocolatier, but I will bet there are hundreds in Gent. Without even considering my proposal, consider how local knowledge could be harnessed to search for real world venues.

To add to the discussion of shopping on the internet: I've actually tried to order from foreign countries before. In this case, buying flowers for my then-girlfriend in Japan.

The difficulties with doing this weren't really related to finding a site and a product. A Google search for flower shops in Tokyo brought up plenty of hits for sites with online ordering and pictures. Where I started to have problems was when I ran into that whole "paying" thing. Some sites wouldn't take my American credit card. Other sites didn't have spaces for an American-style billing address or telephone number. All sites had instructions written in kanji that I couldn't read. So the difficulty wasn't in finding the store and product, but actually making the transaction.

Furthermore, concerning your example of Chinese goods, there are certainly sites out there that cater to buying those sorts of products. The difficulties you run into with regards to this kind of thing are almost always legal or logistical, not technical. For example, Amazon.co.jp allows you to browse in English and buy items, but once you try to ship some items overseas, you run into a brick wall. That's because certain laws prohibit or restrain them from exporting those items. Lik-Sang was sued out of business for shipping certain video game systems to the EU. On the logistical side of things, its not always profitable for a local business to ship their goods internationally, or sometimes even ship their goods at all.

Whew. That all being said, "Window shopping" and "Virtual tourism" are, as far as I can see, "killer apps" of a multi-verse like the one you propose. I honestly hope I'm not being too discouraging. A mutliverse would be a cool technology and, likely, would have some good niches. Its just that I'm still not convinced that its a whole-sale replacement for the current web.

Edit:

Quote:The point is that 3D is the same world that users already live in. What is obvious to do in the real world, should be obvious in the virtual one.

Is it? Some real-world objects and concepts simply wouldn't map to a virtual world, and would require re-training.

Another thing you need to consider, and that I think is being lost in all the discussion, is that even if you have a virtual world, your user isn't interacting with 3D-virtual world. They're interacting with their mouse and keyboard to control an avatar in a 3D virtual-world projected onto a 2D interface (that is, what you're seeing is still 2D, just with the illusion of a third dimension). That is, they're not just going to be able to pick up a book. They have to know that left clicking (or whatever you choose) something is the same as picking it up.

[Edited by - Rycross on December 30, 2009 10:20:52 AM]

Quote:Original post by Rycross
If those small local shops don't have a text-based web presence, why would they have a multi-verse presence?

Fair question. Remember that part of this process is using you, and this community's imaginative capacity, to try and answer these questions. In part, your question asks who owns the Web Wide World (W3) equivalents of real Earth space. If the owner of the shop does, then it would be their responsibility to create a presence. That is how our existing system is supposed to work for domain names. But if these local shops behaved more like a wiki format, then anyone could add content to them. Just an idea.

Quote:I'd also like to point out that symbols aren't really universal like you think they are. They do require training. Lets take a good one: the bathroom symbols of a little person, and a little person wearing a dress. Pretty easy to figure out, right? Now imagine that you're a guy from some small country where they've never used little people symbols to mark a bathroom. How do you know that those little people mark a bathroom? What if the women in your culture never wear dresses? Now think about things like stop signs. The only reason you know what a stop sign means is because you were taught what it means. A child with no training wouldn't know that a green light means go or a red light means stop.

Your symbolic interface will certainly work well if it uses a wide set of symbols that people are already familiar with. The question is if you can use such symbols. Also, re purposing common symbols to new, similar virtual functions doesn't always work out well either. After all, Windows has used "Folders" to hold "Documents" forever, and people still have trouble figuring that out.

I am not advocating symbolic standardization, for as you say, it would be difficult, and on another level, doing so would be imposing another culture's symbology. I would encourage localized symbology, and I would bet that it is easier to learn a foreign symbol than a foreign language (especially with the help of the IA).

Quote:To add to the discussion of shopping on the internet. I've actually tried to order from foreign countries before. In this case, buying flowers for my then-girlfriend in Japan.

The difficulties with doing this weren't really related to finding a site and a product. A Google search for flower shops in Tokyo brought up plenty of hits for sites with online ordering and pictures. Where I started to have problems was when I ran into that whole "paying" thing. Some sites wouldn't take my American credit card. Other sites didn't have spaces for an American-style billing address or telephone number. All sites had instructions written in kanji that I couldn't read. So the difficulty wasn't in finding the store and product, but actually making the transaction.

One of the reasons for using a standardize online currency (I was calling them DigiCash, dCash, Digibucks, dBucks). I see the Internet as a country, and the first step in unifying it is a currency system that is universal.

Quote:Furthermore, concerning your example of Chinese goods, there are certainly sites out there that cater to buying those sorts of products. The difficulties you run into with regards to this kind of thing are almost always legal or logistical, not technical. For example, Amazon.co.jp allows you to browse in English and buy items, but once you try to ship some items overseas, you run into a brick wall. That's because certain laws prohibit or restrain them from exporting those items. Lik-Sang was sued out of business for shipping certain video game systems to the EU. On the logistical side of things, its not always profitable for a local business to ship their goods internationally, or sometimes even ship their goods at all.

I have no immediate solution to this problem, and it is a valid one. I would say that right now the demand for this capability is probably lower than the demand for local products. Were this to change, I would bet that so would the export rules.

Quote:Whew. That all being said, "Window shopping" and "Virtual tourism" are, as far as I can see, "killer apps" of a multi-verse like the one you propose. I honestly hope I'm not being too discouraging. A mutliverse would be a cool technology and, likely, would have some good niches. Its just that I'm still not convinced that its a whole-sale replacement for the current web.

Not to mention education. Imagine an 8th grade class going to the Great Wall of China, and seeing a layer of a 1000 angry Mongols storming the wall (the layer could either be cached on their local system, or streamed). Or a physics class meeting at the center of an atom (which would be a world appended to the hub). What about Machinima? Imagine interactive Machinima.

I understand your skepticism. In fact, I did not start with this idea, but with the much smaller scale idea of a hub world for games. The problem was that the hub world ended up filling so many other roles, it effectively was the World Wide Web, and so many other tools.

I want this level of criticism, for how else can this idea take off. In the end, it is my job to not get discouraged and to convince even a small percent of those watching this to start imagining. That may lead to another advocate, or to participation itself.

Quote:Edit:

The point is that 3D is the same world that users already live in. What is obvious to do in the real world, should be obvious in the virtual one.

Is it? Some real-world objects and concepts simply wouldn't map to a virtual world, and would require re-training.

Another thing you need to consider, and that I think is being lost in all the discussion, is that even if you have a virtual world, your user isn't interacting with 3D-virtual world. They're interacting with their mouse and keyboard to control an avatar in a 3D virtual-world projected onto a 2D interface (that is, what you're seeing is still 2D, just with the illusion of a third dimension). That is, they're not just going to be able to pick up a book. They have to know that left clicking (or whatever you choose) something is the same as picking it up.

If this concept was turned on today, I would agree with you, mouse and keyboard are the standard interface. But five years from now, a touchscreen LCD computer screen/TV will be common. Is reaching out to the screen you are reading this on to scroll up and down the best way to use that technology? I do not think so.