I use The Brain everyday. I have one I use as a toolbar and another that
serves as an interlinked repository of websites. I once wrote a short
article for a Brain newsgroup concluding that it existed not in two
dimensions but in six. My math may have been a little primitive, but its
elegantly complex yet simple interface says something about the attempts
of others to bring 3D to web surfing. Unfortunately, the folks at The
Brain seem to have taken my suggestion that they concentrate on
distributing their interface to websites where they would receive wider
exposure than on individual machines a bit too seriously. They haven't
improved upon the personal version in years. Even so, I agree with you
that it's the best thing out there so far. And it's the only graphic
interface I've seen that would make a decent Chinese character (kanji)
dictionary.

I still think there would be something really cool about a 3D virtual
library that literally had every book, map, and other bit of information
available in the world today in which you could walk down the aisles and
grab a title, open it, and read a fully hyperlinked version of that
title.
______
Steve Franklin

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Evans" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2001 09:21 PM
Subject: Re: news article "Internet sites offer their visitors real
sense of place."


> 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]