>Cc: chris.holt@ncl.ac.uk
>
>I've been worrying about moving through v-space with the equipment
>available; for a quick and dirty version, we can't depend on anything
>other than a mouse and keyboard. So suppose motion isn't continuous;
>suppose there are discrete points of view, and we teleport to these.
>That is, the underlying position space is discrete (though not
>necessarily with uniform distances between the points of view).
>When you look at a scene, then, you've got the objects laid out
>in the way we all imagine; but there are also viewpoints hovering
>in space at strategic locations; twinkles, such that when you
>click on them, you move there. To turn around, or look up or
>down, you'd have twinkles around the edge of the viewing window;
>thus, rotations would be discrete as well. Of course, people with
>fancy equipment could do all kinds of computationally expensive
>interpolations to smooth things out. Would this be reasonable?
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>Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk ftp://tuda.ncl.ac.uk/pub/local/ncmh1/nameplate.html
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> I had rather be a dog and bay the moon, / Than such a cybernaut.
Chris brings up important root issues - and makes me think of some of my own
branches.
I'm also concerned with the actual speed of the equipment. Nifty rendering
engines are fine - what happens if the computing horsepower isn't enough to
render an image? How about a "twinkles" alternative...
1.) Should objects have some sort of "priority" in rendering? For instance,
you walk into a VRML-defined room. If your machine has enough free cycles, it
renders the carpet-image on the floor. If not, it makes the floor a solid
color. This would still allow for first-person immersion, just at much lower
frame rates (or varying levels of detail).
2.) There are several data streams coming from your VRML-world source. Your
link loses some of its bandwidth - which streams take priority? Should the world
stop updating, or only non-critical sections of it? [tangent: Intelligent Agent
to make this determination?]
Ideas, ideas... thanks for the inspiration Chris, and thanks for the VRML list,
Mark and Brian. The net shall never be the same again.
Regards,
Neil Haldar
Director of Studio Operations
Zinc Studios<tm>
"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be."
-Tennyson 1809-1892