TurboGopher enhanced with a 3-D Spacial User Interface.
Why a 3D user interface to Gopher?
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Gopher has an explicit organization and structure which is
external to the content of the documents, so it is straightforward
to map a 3D virtual world interface onto the existing gopher
servers. Since the Gopher+ protocol also has provisions for open
ended extensions and meta-information that resides external to the
content of documents, it is also easy for servers to give 3D-savvy
clients the 3D spatial coordinates and orientation of objects in a
gopher directory. This means that we can both synthesize 3D scenes
from existing non-3D-savvy Gopher servers, and take advanatge of
new 3D-savvy servers without reworking the contents of the
documents published in Gopher.
Virtual world interfaces give us a powerful data visualization
tool. GopherVR makes it possible to display clustering of documents
which is not feasible on either a menu or a flat page. Combining
GopherVR with servers that catagorize and cluster collections of
documents will make it possible to visualize complex retationships
within collections. To be effective, moving about the 3D scene must
be fast and fluid, and GopherVR has been optimized for quick
navigationn within the scene without hardware Z-buffer.
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You may want to view the Screenshot.gif file and the two Quicktime
movie files to get a better idea of what the VR interface is all about.
