Tag Archives: hyperlinks

Speech and thought bubbles in the 3D Web

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 I was thinking about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication, and how synchronous communication has been successfully ported to fleshed-out, CGI-heavy "virtual worlds" like Second Life and IMVU (hence the oft-used descriptor "glorified chatroom" in regards to such virtual worlds).

Apparently, because of the enduring popularity and expanding capability of the World Wide Web, it isn’t likely that we’ll see a big move to a "3D Web" anytime soon, at least not in the way that we’ve seen such massive movements from text-driven mediums such as MU*s and (IRC, Yahoo, MSN, AIM) chat rooms to the modern-day virtual worlds. However, if synchronous text and voice chat have become mainstays of most active or ongoing MMOGs such as SL and WoW, then why is it that asynchronous communication – that which relies upon "boards" to contain persistent messages – has not been successfully reimagined in a 3D, CGI-heavy context? And what would a 3D Web look like?

I would think that the first measure to accomplish in the fleshout (or avatarization?) of asynchronous communication would be to flesh out the "pages" which are used to contain submitted information. Pages are text-centric documents, are presented as flat, 2D objects onto which information is appended, are encoded with a wide variety of strategically-placed visual cues (or "GUI elements") which allow for the web browser to perform just as wide of a variety of actions, and are accessed through devices which are best designed to interact with flat, 2D objects, i.e., keyboards and computer mice.

So a few ideas spring to mind:

  • Replace hyperlinked documents with hyperlinked speech bubbles/clouds
  • Augment text with 3D-native visual communication systems which drive any one person’s thoughts directly to the user without losing anything in translation or clarification.
  • Flesh the bubbles out into a 3D visualization
  • Design a variety of stationary or dynamic GUI elements which provide for smooth navigation between 3D speech bubbles.
  • Promote 3D-centric navigatory input devices

I think that Ted Nelson, the man behind the Xanadu project (also called "the longest running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry" by Wired magazine in 1996), might be right in his contention that Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s implementation of the WWW was a well-intentioned, much-too-document-centric oversimplification of his own ideas on hypertext. So perhaps a re-visualization of how we interact with asynchronous communication tools could lead to a translation of what we’ve placed into the 2D Web into a 3D structure that is much more fleshed-out and tangible.

I will think more about this idea for a 3D Web in the future.

3D windows

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I like how Open Cobalt, another virtual world project, allows for the linking of two in-world spaces using 3D window frames, which can swivel from side-to-side, provide live views of whatever’s going on in the opposite end of the window and allow for one to walk an avatar through the window into the other in-world space. It reminds me of what I once told someone when I was logged into SL (I think it had more to do with streaming video than with being able to walk between virtual world areas, though). Example of this method begins below at 0:38.

I wonder, however, if this method of hyperlinking can be embedded into the virtual world’s persistent objects, such as buildings? In fact, just like how originally non-electronic text was eventually imported to the Web and enhanced with context-specific links, the same could be done with 3D copies of real world (and virtual) objects into the virtual world, namely appending links into the objects which link them to the views of other virtual objects; a wiki approach could be used in this process, whereby "redlinks" (or in this case, null spaces) can be linked within these virtual objects in order to allow users to create the new objects in the null spaces.

The problem of appending links to 3D objects is the way that these links should look embedded within the objects without any visually disturbances. If frames are going to be one of the main presentational means of linking one object to another, then it would have to maintain a color or design scheme that is distinguishable from the rest of the object but not too distinguishable. It would also need a means of navigation that makes frames easily responsive to the mouse pointer, no matter how visually skewed the linked portion looks from the rest of the object.

"Hyperframes" could also be a major boost to the usage of "tabbed traveling" or "tabbed teleportation" in virtual worlds, since they would be middle-clickable to allow for a new tab of a new space to be visited non-linearly.

The Mobile Web, and why wikis aren’t “mobile applications”

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The Mobile Web is the World Wide Web as seen and used on millions of mobile devices.

The best mobile web browser, arguably, is Safari on the iPhone OS, at least because you can surf the Web using up to 8 tabs.

However, I, like Google, thinks surfing the Web on a mobile device, even the “Mobile Web”, sucks. Caching web pages on Safari tends to be very short-lived, albeit because of the poor battery life of the iPhone and iPod touch, and copy-paste would be nice to use on the iPhone OS.

But most of all, using “made-for-iPhone” web applications on Safari tends to be sucky (although Facebook’s web app tends be a bit more usable, touchy-feely and animated than any of Google’s Web-based offerings). So with the opening on July 10th of the App Store after months of preparation and queuing by both development startups and Web-based companies who wanted to deliver a better mobile approach to their web services than would be reachable on their own mobile browser-based services, I suppose that a new rule of mobile Internet-dependent software development was realized:

Never create for a web browser what you can create as a native application that can pull and present data from off the Web or another Internet-based application.

Or: Apple may have intentionally let WebKit deal with “made-for-iPhone” web apps so horribly in order to pressure Web-based companies into making use of the iPhone SDK and the App Store to deliver far-better, but more proprietary, user interfaces for RIAs than could ever be hoped for on Safari for iPhone OS.

Either way, this means that the “apps” of the Web (social networking, blogging, email, pseudo-SMS, etc.), if they want to attract more flies, will have to be recreated as native apps for the iPhone OS, Symbian OS, and other current and future operating systems (with the exception of Palm. Their OS doesn’t deserve any recognition, LOL.). It may be nice for Apple to allow background processes in the future to allow for cross-platform development and widget design for the same-branded native apps on more than one OS.

However, after all the web apps for mobile phones have been turned into native apps, what will remain on the Mobile Web? Or at least what websites will remain that can’t be fully or successfully converted into native mobile apps (it feels like I’m asking about who will remain after the Apocalypse or something like that)?

I think one candidate for such a position would be any wiki website, especially Wikipedia.

Simply put, wikis are dynamic websites that allow one to create a page about anything (that’s notable or important); they also make it rather easy to link to other articles by typing “[[ ]]” around any word or group of words, although that means if a linked article doesn’t exist (hence the red text of a non-existent page link) then one can create the missing article by clicking on the red link, which presents a “Create this page” page. Rinse and repeat.

As you can see, an article on a wiki can fill up pretty fast with an array of links to, well, anything on the wiki that needs “wikilinking” (oh, and the slightly less-common, but necessary hyperlinking for external links and references).

So trying to create a hypothetical Wikipedia application for mobile touchscreen-input access on the iPhone OS is something that may very well run aground when one has to open up links of either the wiki- or hyper- type.

Plus, links on a webpage, especially on a wiki, aren’t designed as buttons. They’re designed as text links (and image links that direct to the original wikipage of the image). So hyperlinks or wikilinks can’t, at the moment, be considered as widgets that can be tapped in order to deliver or render animated transitions of the user interface from one page to another, except for the basic loading of another page. And let’s not forget about how, whenever one opens up a hyperlink in a native app, the webpage immediately and automatically opens up in Safari, thus bring us back to the Mobile Web.

One developer can partially remedy this for the creation of a native Wikipedia or wiki reader by simply stripping the text of any links, although that would take away the “fun” in navigating through Wiki articles. Another can remedy this by styling the wikilinks, reflinks and hyperlinks as touchy-feely widgets, although that would result in a wide interspersion of “embedded” but raised widgets within the text.

Finally, no web-based third-party Wikipedia-for-iPhone reader in existence has taken on how a wiki can be edited within the iPhone OS using a virtual touchscreen keyboard that takes up nearly half the screen’s real estate. Not even Wikipedia’s own official mobile interface.

Do I think that a mobile wiki that can do just as much as a web-based wiki can be created? I don’t discount the possibility.

But I don’t think that the current situation of mobile software development or mobile user interface design lends a great deal of resources to such an ideal as a mobile, iPhone-accessible wiki interface.