Announcing alpha-test releases of Internet GopherVR for Macintosh and Unix Announcing GopherVR ------------------- At GopherCON '94 we talked about using 3D scenes as a user interface metaphor for navigating the Internet and visualizing relationships and clustering of documents. Early (alpha test) releases of Macintosh and Unix Gopher clients that display 3D scenes are now available via gopher and anonymous ftp from boombox.micro.umn.edu. Although not yet complete, in this release you can browse gopher directories by driving around Gopherspace, navigate between gopher servers by driving through a series of 3D scenes, open items by clicking on them, get overviews of the neighborhood you are in, and view meta-information about items. Because this is an alpha-test release, we are still working on the software and will be doing frequent bugfix releases. Use it at your own risk, and please send us bug reports and comments. We are doing an early release of this software because we have found this to be the best way of quickly shaking out bugs and feature sets. To keep up to date on the bugfix releases of GopherVR, subscribe to gopher-news by e-mailing a subscribe request to: gopher-news-request@boombox.micro.umn.edu Major new releases are announced on gopher-announce. Subscribe by sending e-mail to: gopher-announce-request@boombox.micro.umn.edu Why a 3D user interface to Gopher? ---------------------------------- Gopher has an explicit organization and structure which is external to the content of the documents, so it is straightforward to map a 3D virtual world interface onto the existing gopher servers. Since the Gopher+ protocol also has provisions for open ended extensions and meta-information that resides external to the content of documents, it is also easy for servers to give 3D-savvy clients the 3D spatial coordinates and orientation of objects in a gopher directory. This means that we can both synthesize 3D scenes from existing non-3D-savvy Gopher servers, and take advanatge of new 3D-savvy servers without reworking the contents of the documents published in Gopher. Virtual world interfaces give us a powerful data visualization tool. GopherVR makes it possible to display clustering of documents which is not feasible on either a menu or a flat page. Combining GopherVR with servers that catagorize and cluster collections of documents will make it possible to visualize complex retationships within collections. To be effective, moving about the 3D scene must be fast and fluid, and GopherVR has been optimized for quick navigationn within the scene without hardware Z-buffer. What comes after this release? ------------------------------ With later versions of this software you will be able to define 3D icons for objects in Gopherspace, and server administrators will be able to specify placement of objects in 3D scenes. In addition, there will be more user navigation features for browsing within the 3D scenes. Macintosh --------- TurboGopherVR 2.1a1 is a sneak-preview (alpha-test) release of an Internet Gopher client that combines a point and click browser interface to the Internet with a 3D virtual-world interface. Essentially, this is a superset of the current release version of TurboGopher (version 2.0) with 3D extensions. TurboGopherVR 2.1a1 requires a PowerPC Macintosh running System 7 or better. System 7.5.1 is reccommended since this version of the system software includes a much improved floating point math library. A version for 68K Macs is also under construction but is not yet available. To get the software, gopher to boombox.micro.umn.edu and follow the path /gopher/Macintosh-TurboGopher/TurboGopherVR. This brings you to the directory holding the current version of the software. You can also use these URLs to get to the same directory: Unix --------- GopherVR 0.1 is an alpha-test release of an X-window Gopher client. GopherVR for Unix is curently available for SUN Sparc, SGI, and IBM AIX RS-6000 platforms. At this time, only binaries are available since we expect frequent changes to the source. To run the software, you will need a color monitor. We have tested the software on SUN SunOS 4.1.3 with MIT X11R5 distribution SGI IRIX 5.3 with SGI's X-windows distribution IBM AIX 3.2.5 with IBM's X-windows distribution To get the software, gopher to boombox.micro.umn.edu and follow the path /gopher/Unix/GopherVR. This brings you to the directory holding the current version of the software. You can also use these URLs to get to the same directory: GopherVR binaries will be available for HP-UX and DEC OSF soon. NOTE ---- This is an alpha test release. We wouldn't reccomend distributing this to every user in your organization yet, since 1.) There are a lot more features that will be added in the near future 2.) There are certainly going to be bugs. If you find a bug, please report it to us by sending an e-mail decribing your computer, the version of the operating system and how you caused the bug to occur. If you have ideas for features we'd love to hear about it. Send your bug reports and comments to: . Internet Gopher Team / mongoose & iguana squad TurboGopherVR 2.1.a1 Unix GopherVR 0.1 March 30, 1995 See you at GopherCON '95 ! For information on GopherCON '95 see: .