> Mike, your proposal sounds really interesting, and I believe a fair
> assessment of how 3D projections may play out. Google seemed to be
> really interested in defining 3D projections over Streetview, which is
> somewhat surprising since they didn't publish an open API and shut me
> down personally for providing code samples how to access their data. I
> still think that could be an interesting avenue for beginning to do
> spatial projections that people find meaningful, even in a proof of
> concept form.
>
3D Projections over Streetview? Did not know any such aspirations were in
the works - sounds great!
I've spoken about this ad nauseum but if you look at projects like Russ
Smith's ODE project { http://ode.org } you see a model of reality that has a
somewhat different focus than VRML and other community efforts to define
space.
In ODE the focus is on describing the constraints between things. For
example one describes that a given surface has certain frictive properties,
or that two bodies are connected by a particular kind of relationship:
http://ode.org/pix/joints.jpg
Machines can use models to help speculate about desired outcomes; to help us
find islands of stability in complex systems with potentially millions of
parameters.
In books such as A Pattern Language the same thesis emerges; define things
by their relationships not by their appearances...
http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199
So I just want to encourage anybody thinking about this kind of stuff to
really try to focus on a way to capture function not just form...
For ubicomp kinds of things it would be nice to capture not just that 'joe
met mary on this corner' but rather that the corner is a kind of surface
that is traversable by pedestrians; and that it is a place where joes can
meet marys ... Perhaps some of this is reversible from a sufficient number
of impressions of a given corner but it would be nice to have something
beyond implicit knowledge.
a
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