From: peter@130.63.231.100 (peter)
Subject: Re: APPS: VR as Programming Aid
Date: 30 Aug 1996 02:55:04 GMT
Message-ID: <505l68$6b@sunburst.ccs.yorku.ca>
Organization: York University


Daniel Green wrote

"Marc Bernatchez wrote:
. . .  
> I guess you'll have to be patient and wait for the technology to catch
> up our fertile imaginative minds ;-)

Perhaps you needn't wait at all if you rephrase the problem not as how
one can display a 360 degree virtual screen, but as how not to get
lost among lots of spatially arranged documents. I.e. a larger virtual
desktop.  . . . .  
What I'd suggest would be a 2D desktop but displaying a non-linear
space so that the current page(s) you want to eximine is displayed
in the center of the screen and takes up most of the real-estate, but
all the other documents are still visible but scaled down the further
they are from the center document. You could click on any page and
drag it into the center where it gets magnified, and you'll still
where the other pages go to as they shrink into the distance.

Such a system was demonstrated I believe at last year's SIGGRAPH
perhaps on a panel on visualizing the internet but could be easily
adapted to this problem and should require nothing more high-tech
than an existing fast CPU."

Right on! The application and client software (including Netscape
plugin) is available now (and is incredibly easy to use). It's called
Project-X and is freely available at http://mcf.research.apple.com/.

                    . . . .  Peter Roosen-Runge  
peter@130.63.231.100 (peter)