From: John Eagan <76130.2225@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: DESIGN: Doors between virtual worlds
Originator: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: University of Washington
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 23:08:44 GMT



dstamp@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca (Dave Stampe-Psy+Eng) writes:

>76130.2225@CompuServe.COM (John Eagan) writes:
>
>>The way I'm thinking of this (see earlier posts), is that each World
>>is a completely separate, discrete unit. Each World contains it's own
>>....
>>The way I'm starting to look at this is first, the Universe would be a
>>simple matrix of objects acting as Portals..<stuff del>... you could
>>navigate "virtually" through the
>>matrix to get to the Portal for the World you want, or there could
>>also be an addressing system based on 3d coordinates....i.e., you
>>could go directly to a "known" World by typing, say, "1.235.24" and
>>one would then be located at the Portal for that World.
>
>I think this is a bit simplistic: if we define things based on regions
>and forget about room-like "worlds" we get a much more realistic view.
>Worlds are fine, but let's look at them as poorly-connected regions of
>the region-connection graph.  That way we can have BIG worlds, made up
>of simple regions.  After all, travel is half the fun, right?

Sure, admittedly simplistic. However, that doesn't mean you have to
limit yourself to a whole collection of tiny little Worlds. A world
could be absolutely freakin' HUGE, involving many linked Regions
within the world, allowing you to roam to your heart's content. Where
I see the usefulness, if not necessity, of Portals and discrete,
separate Worlds, is in keeping separate domains within which the
designer of a particular World can do what they want (within a common
methodology of defining Worlds, of course) without worrying about
complexities of transitions to other Worlds, different scales, general
"laws", etc. For that matter, Worlds designed by different people, at
different places in the network, but with much in common in the design
(you have a World and I have a World, and they both have a landscape,
with equal gravity in each holding you to that landscape, in similar
physical scale...) they could be linked by "World-to-World" Portals to
each other, to expand a user's range.

>>(bunch of my stuff about Portals deleted>
>
>If you want to, fine.  But portals aren't the basis of the world
>network, they're special cases.  Otherwise you end up with something
>like VR Studio, with blank portals connecting simple areas.  OK for
>playing video games, but far too simple for immersive VR.

Maybe, maybe not. I see your point though. An example would be, for
instance, if there's "Dave's World", and you would want to move from
that into "Bernie's World" next door, you probably don't want to pop
through a Portal where you suddenly aren't in "Dave's World" anymore
but rather in Bernie's World, with a complete wiping of the slate, so
to speak, in between. You would want to just virtually stroll from
Dave's World into Bernie's World, in a contiguous smooth transition.
Good point. In that sort of case, yes, the kind of crude, clunky
shifts of domain like you get in VR Studio would be pretty
undesirable.

Still, it seems to me like there is a need for a simple "navigation
space", as I've suggested in the Universe scheme, where you have a
very simple sort of neutral level to start from, and return to, with
discrete containers as in the way I've referred to Worlds. In the case
of something like the example in the previous paragraph, you could
work together in cooperation to link different Regions together in one
big World (kind of like if, say, a virtual US and Australia, no longer
dealing with matter, deciding to link borders, producing one
continuous landscape, while retaining the border between them!) while
still having Worlds as separate discrete units in the overall
Universe.

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