Sewing Worlds Together With SEAMS: A Mechanism To Construct Large-Scale Virtual Environments

Despite the undisputed visual appeal of 3-D applications on the Web, efforts like the virtual reality modeling language (VRML) [Pesc1995] are still not in widespread use and commercial three-dimensional worlds like Alphaworld [Worl1997]. are only sparsely populated. Why is it that the idea of Cyberspace as first presented over a decade ago in William Gibson’s novel “Neuromancer” [Gibs1984] is so enormously appealing, yet we see little manifestation of these ideas in our everyday technological environment? A partial answer may be found by looking at some important prerequisites for an implementation of Cyberspace [Schm1996a]: • Scalability means that virtual environments can continue to grow without any limitation. Beyond technical challenges, organizational issues come into play, which have been widely neglected. In particular, connection of individually modeled virtual environments lacks support. • Continuity allows the user to travel to any place in a virtual universe without ever having to resort to non-continuous motion such as teleportation (anchors in VRML), which frequently leads to disorientation [Bowm1997]. • Democracy. Everybody should be able to build his own world without being constrained in any way. One should not be constrained by a providers’s policy or by “real estate” management in Cyberspace, as in Stephenson’s novel “Snow Crash” [Step1992], where prestigious coordinates for personal worlds are valuable assets.