Comments on: The World Wide 3D Web

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:49:40 +0000

The interesting idea that popped into my head while reading this was linking regions together, but not necessarily just with a link/portal window, but closer to a region “crossing”
Is it terribly infeasible that if I have a region (say on a 1and1 server) and my friend has a region (say on a GoDaddy server) and we want to “join” our land together akin to a landmass, couldn’t there some way to enable this without requiring them to exist next to eachother on the same grid?
Accomplishing something like this would make the “Grid” concept even more moot since anyone with a region could choose what 4 other regions share a border.
If possible, it would create some interesting situations as well such as what happens if I decide to link one of my borders to another location, but they do not share it back. One could see or walk across from one direction, but not the other. This would also create the possibility that walking west, then north, then east then south across boundaries wouldn’t necessarily mean ending up in the same place.
It also raises the interesting possibility (since the regions are volumes) of linking above and below, creating stacked regions.

By: Psyke Phaeton

Psyke Phaeton — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:30:03 +0000

I hope then like a web page we have portals/links to other islands so the islands can be “surfed”. Having no grid removes exploration and requires then a search engine to find things and that requires you to have a pre-defined interest. This makes it no longer a world/universe but a series of discrete hidden islands.

Worlds can be explored, the web must be searched. They are different things.

By: Adam Frisby

Adam Frisby — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:25:38 +0000

Well, I think at the heart of it, Content is far more important than space - your visiting an environment for it’s content.

On the Second Life Grid today, there’s approx 22,000 private islands, and ~7000 mainland regions. Most of those 22,000 are separate entities with their own sun/moon cycle, etc, and that’s the way people have preferred it. Continents by comparison are a very rare beast.

By: Peter Quirk

Peter Quirk — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:14:52 +0000

As I commented on Justin’s article, the grid is a natural way of dividing geography into manageable units with an implied navigation system. Most well-drawn street directories use a grid format, with a convention that as you travel east you go to the next page, while north-south travel requires you to move a stride back or forward on the grid.

If you do away with the grid concept, you have to do away with normal physics at the boundaries of your island. In theory, each island now has its own timeframe, since there is no concept of the Sun and moon apparently moving from east to west across adjacent regions. Even the compass points become highly suspect because while you may link the eastern boundary of your region to the western boundary of someone else’s region, they may not link their western boundary back to your eastern boundary.

You can abandon the grid if you think that space is much less important than content. I think that what makes virtual worlds so different from the web is that they embody the concepts of volumetric space, distance, proximity, direction and gravity so naturally. I’d hate to lose them because we want to tie the representation of the world to our concept of the web which is based on an abstraction of the printed page and citations (hyperlinks).