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Back in 1994 I created a small "world" linked to different types of data repositories on the net through my Nintentno PowerGlove. Since then I have seen many different types of information navigation applications, from research labs to commercial products. As a founding member of the Boston Computer Society Virtual Reality Group, in 1993 we had people coming by all the time showing off 3D navigation applications, and they were all mostly cool for about an hour, or until you had to to something really important with them. I am convinced that The Brain(the application not the greymatter) is the closest we have come to a decent way to navigate massive amounts of information. I'ts not perfect, but it scales well. I am still waiting for someone to improve the interface though, the idea is there, the implementation is rough as it's hard to tell how "deep" you are into a topic. Muriel Cooper's work at MIT Media Lab was fascinating, whatever happened to the idea of mapping data onto simple objects like cubes and letting typography provide the cues as to topic, relevance, depth, etc? Simple, elegant, efffective. Throwing all this 3D gee-wiz interaface technology at the problem is the wrong way to go about developing the next generation of information navigation applications. Companies that have tried this end up on Bonus Pack CD-ROMs sold with cheap PC's. Lets take things back to basics- find out whats important to people, refine refine refine the model, then apply whatever technology works. Just my two cents, I've been reading these threads for 8 years now and it's always pretty much the same thing. I remember having a meeting with SGI when Cosmo browser came out, brainstorming ways they were going to pay us $100k to develop "cool stuff that would make people use the plug-in" and they could sell hardware(even GETTING that meeting with them was amazing ;-). 3D worlds representing data, spinning cubes, land-based representations, done done done, none of it worked then why should it work now? David Evans [log in to unmask]