Michael Heim wrote a book in 1993 called “The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality” and one chapter in particular strongly affected my relation to the internet and my desire to make it my play/work ground since about 10 years now.
This article was called “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace”. You can still find the original here, but i shall keep a copy in this blog post, just in case, as I like to read it again every now and then, a kind of paegan bible in a way.
As you’ll see it’s quite an experimental project in terms of interface and interactivity. We ended up calling it an “interactive barcode”. And in fact, the “barcode” term is well suited to the concept behind the interface: to generate a unique representation of Lisa’s work in a non-metaphorical manner, but rather through indexing of her image sets according to four main keywords.
Among the bunch of new entries added to the jquery plugin repository today, one of them caught my attention as being a really clever way to display a huge list of entries in a nicely digestible manner: the ListNav jquery plugin.
A few years ago, we did experiments in 3D on the web using the VRML technology. A heavy argument was a hefty 5 megs plugin to install, and only on Internet Explorer. No mac, no firefox, no nothing. VRML is now a almost forgotten technology and it seemed no one saw a reason to pursue the quest for a proper 3D rendering engine to consult and interact in 3D inside your favorite browser. Until…