I’ve been reading cyberpunk novels lately. For those unfamiliar with the genre, the action revolves around a virtual world which is a representation of the entire internet. Usually the world is navigated with an elaborate interface which provides the user with an immersive real-world experience. One of the more imaginative devices featured in one of the books was a procto-pod which you insert you-know-where, thereby interfacing your central nervous system with the internet.

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This virtual world experience (with or without the procto-pod) has been touted as the future of the internet by authors and future technologists for years, even before anything we would recognise as an internet existed. So why isn’t it here yet, how close are we, and how desirable is the dream?

In real terms, we are light years away from this immersive experience. The main barriers are bandwith, computing power and the technology required to bridge the gap between the data and the avatar-isation of that data.

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In terms of the interfacing technology required to make us believe in the virtual world, we have come some way. VR headsets exist. Some say they are effective, some say they cause seasickness. We’ve almost cracked it with surround-sound technology. Thats the good news, the bad news is that nothing exists to fool our other senses yet. Smellovision has been just around the corner since the 60s, and I can’t see it arriving any time soon – the same goes for any taste-on-demand technology, and tactile feedback systems are still primitive. We have vibrating joypads and steering wheels with opposing force and vibration. You can even buy a system which modulates a fan’s speed from the speed of your virtual car to get the wind-in-your-face feeling. Ultimately these gadgets fool us slightly for a few minutes and we generally disable them once the novelty wears off.

Windows 7 is taking cues from Apple, and it does appear that we may see a renaissance in computer input interfaces, with multi-touch screens and gesture based interaction offering a potentially more elegant solution to the keyboard ( a device that was deliberately invented to slow down the typist) and the mouse.

What about the requirements for the visual system? Second Life is probably the closest we’ve gotten so far, and that feels like wading through jelly at the best of times. But even Second Life is just a small construct within the internet. Every node has to be painstakingly constructed, from a limited palette with rules and regulations. What we seek is an interface that converts the entire world wide web into a 3-d world, and we are only starting to dip our toes into more graphical representations of the web with sites like spacetime.com.

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One of the biggest challenges is going to be finding a way to map the structure of the internet to a virtual geography. If we have a building representing Spiralli Business Solutions, the building might be on the corner of Web Development Street and Print Design Boulevard, but we would then need another office on Brand Merchandising Avenue, forcing our customer to traipse from one office to the other if they require multiple services from us. Now think about the number of services offered by a company like Yahoo, and this model starts to creak at the seams. We could offer virtual doors that portal us from one location to another, but that is not a feature of the real world, and would therefore be a probable source of confusion. The real world and the internet are based on two very different and perhaps even incompatible models.

Perhaps we need a new model. I’m picturing a system like papervision as the engine, with a layer between it and the web in general.  It is this layer that will make or break the system – how do we provide an abstraction of the internet that lends itself to an intuitive 3d environment?

For the moment, file the virtual world internet away with the hover car and the self cleaning house, to be revisited in a decade or so.