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by contingencies 4281 days ago
VR and the web are too far apart.

... for what purpose? Web pages are hard to simplify. Even harder to transform, in a generally applicable way, in to 3D objects that hold the full meaning and functionality of their present-era 2D brethren.
1 comments
xnxn 4281 days ago
That's true, and I don't think the goal is to simplify or transform the existing web of hypertext, but to take the well-proven principles behind it - hyperlinks, interoperability, decentralization, etc. - and apply them to the nascent medium of VR. It certainly won't supplant web pages.

"But why?" is a totally fair question, and I don't think I can produce a satisfactory answer. I've spent a good deal of time thinking about concrete use cases for VR, and, well... it's a medium, like paper, or like video - but it's interactive, so it has more in common with the telephone, or video games, or your web browser. It can be more illustrative to try and imagine things you can't do (and now I really sound like I've drunk the VR Kool-Aid, huh?).

Can I ask if your skepticism is specific to this project, or to the idea of a distributed, programmable VR platform?

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contingencies 4280 days ago
Can I ask if your skepticism is specific to this project, or to the idea of a distributed, programmable VR platform?

Well, I've been down the same path before, as with others here .. judging by the earlier comments. I don't discount 3D, far from it, however my conclusion, personally, was that different people consider different types of visualizations preferable or inherantly clearer. For instance, a statistician, mathematician, programmer, poet, sculptor or gamer may wish to visualize or interact with the same information in a very different way. If you accept this temporarily for the sake of argument, then take those same different input/interaction paradigms and start to translate them across multiple cultures and languages, I believe you get an even higher number of preferences. Trying to create the one true standard for interaction with mock-physical representations of aphysical notions may just be trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

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