HyperSpace HyperSpace is a prototype World-Wide Web visualiser that can be used to display the organisation of areas of the web. It structures the information not according to geographical location, but according to a user-defined structure, which means that related topics are displayed adjacent to each other, and unrelated topics are spatially separated. Each page on the web is represented as a sphere, and links from one page to another are represented as links between the spheres. These spheres and links are placed into a 3-d virtual reality system, initially randomly. The chaotic and unstructured mesh of nodes and links is then allowed to self-organise according to some imposed physics within the reality.
Nodes repel each other, whilst links provide an attractive force.
Thus, unrelated areas that do not have links between them are pushed apart, whilst highly-interrelated work is pulled together and clustered in the same region of space. Characteristic structures form that serve as landmarks to aid and guide the navigation process. All the data is collated together, to be used by the HyperSpace viewer. This assigns each URL a sphere whose size is dependent on the number of links and a random spatial position. A ray-traced image of the initial random structure reflected in one of the page nodes, with an MPEG movie showing the web structure moving from its starting chaotic structure to its final organisation.