Future Directions

There are a number of directions these experiments can take. First it would be useful to extend the in-line graphic control to interact with a program that computes the views on the fly and returns a new in-line image file. This approach should also be practical for wide Mosaic distribution as the 3D computations and rendering takes place on the server and image files could be sent back to less powerful CPUs, i.e. PCs.

In addition extensions to the external application, URLviewer, to allow use of an immersive environment should prove useful. The addition of a 3D position tracker and head mounted display (HMD) would enable the user to become immersed in the environment and therefore indirectly into the data. Current HMDs however are not of sufficient quality to allow for any significant amount of textual reading so new representations of information would need to be developed.

Finally there is also an opportunity for the generation of VR clip art that could be used in conjunction with these approaches. 3D clip art has been around for a number of years [Swivel] [NEC]. These clip art packages provide the end user with manipulable objects that can be positioned and rotated to any orientation and then included into documents. For the WWW one would like to travel to a location (i.e. a dinosaur museum) and get a 3D clip art object meaningful to the user and place that object on ones virtual bookshelf. You then attach the URL to the object and now you have a 3D hotlist meaningful to the user.

Acknowledgments

Most of the actual labor to realize these experiments are due to a number of students I was fortunate to work with. Mark Pflaging a student at George Washington University working for Joe Psotka at the Open Virtual Reality Testbed) modified the SceneViewer application. Allen Sun a student at MIT working at NIST glued the Inventor application to Mosaic and developed the Virtual Corridor in-line graphics program. Sharon Davison a student a Catholic University and Mark Pflaging modeled the house for Sharon's dissertation.

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