Re: [9fans] The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org]

lucio@proxima.alt.za writes:

> I don't even remember the name of the feature, but I used a tool way
> back in the very early days of a public Internet (it was called a MOO,

> Given a browser-style interface with 3D capabilities, it would address
> social networking considerably better than Facebook (with which I have

> For that is what social media provide: a world-wide stage on which you
> perform selections from your real life and any fantasy life you choose

Very interesting.  I was envisioning a system which would (at least on
its GUI side) present information in the form of a Web page, like
Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  I hadn't thought of abandoning the Web page,
altogether, for some other kind of "social space" browser.  I wonder
what that might be like.

[Disclaimer: This is NOT a formal or serious proposal for a new Plan 9
file system.  (Not yet, at least.)  It's just an exploration of some
potentially possible possibilities.]

For a social network to be useful, it must provide some intuitive
mapping between information in the virtual world and its real-life
referents.  (In contemporary social networks, these take the form of
person/place names, mugshots, and interactive maps with balloon icons.)
The space which humans are most familiar with navigating, of course, is
meatspace - the physical, brick-and-mortar world.  It makes sense, then,
that the most intuitive interface would offer some kind of three-
dimensional virtual reality.  The simplest, most intuitive mapping
between virtual space and meatspace would probably be to visually
"overlay" information from the virtual space onto meatspace.  Technology
(mostly in the form of various head-mounted glasses or goggles) already
exists which allows a person to see what's around them, while projecting
information ontop of what they see.  A device such as this has generally
been called an "eye tap".  But it has a problem: when you turn your
head, the display turns with it.  In order for the UI to be as intuitive
as the physical world, it would have to maintain orientation with its
physical environment.  Tracking motion of the user's head could be done
using accellerometers, a la Oculus Rift.  Imagine a Rift with two video
cameras on its front (to provide a binocular view on the physical world)
that overlays a digital world ontop of the real world you see.  Virtual
arrows could guide you where you need to go without needing directions.
When you get near your favorite Chinese restaurant, a balloon could
appear in your view, giving you access to information about it.  When
GPS magic detects that a friend of yours is nearby, an friendly-looking
arrow appears, indicating the general direction and approximate distance
to him or her.

In order for a virtual world to be useful, however, simply mimicking the
physical world won't do; its physics must differ from the physics of the
real world in some useful way.  If your favorite restaurant is two miles
from your present location, for example, you won't want to walk two
miles to find its virtual balloon.  :) Navigating the virtual space
would require some way to stretch/pan space and time, allowing the user
to "fly" about and move forward/backward in time within the virtual
world, before restoring the overlay to match normal space/time.  You
would, for example, be able to hike the trail I hiked yesterday, even
after I got back from hiking it.  If I recorded GPS waypoints and/or
stereoscopic video along the way, you could hike right along with me,
having a conversation with my avatar about your favorite edible plants.
Then, I could "rewind" time and watch your hike & conversation as well
(assuming that you decided to share it with me).

An ability to stretch/shrink distances in virtual space enables use of
non-Euclidean volumes, as well.  Imagine "dimension compression"
technology as seen in the (sci-fi) movie Ultraviolet, or in the TARDIS
of Dr. Who.  ("It's bigger on the inside!")  You could stuff as many
files as you want into a single filing cabinet, have a filing cabinet
with a potentially infinite number of drawers, or stuff as many filing
cabinets as you want into a police call box which shrinks down and stows
neatly inside a virtual watch that you wear on your virtual wrist.  Want
to send a FAX?  Press a button on your virtual watch, and out pops your
personal TARDIS.  Reach inside it, grab your virtual FAX machine, grab
the document you want to send, and feed it through.  (You can fast-
forward time, if you like, so you don't have to wait for each page to
scan.)  When you're done, just hit the "poof" button on your virtual
watch, and everything neatly folds itself back inside.

Such a non-Euclidean 4-dimensional space full of nested objects could
certainly be represented as a file system.  Omero and Olive
(technically, o/mero and o/live) from the Octopus project over at LSUB
already allow one to represent a two-dimensional GUI as a file system.
(All or part of a GUI on one machine can be tar(1)ed up and untarred on
another machine, reproducing the same GUI.)  It stands to reason that
such an approach could be extended to allow representation of a greater
number of widgets, with real-life social signifigance, in a space with
more than two dimensions.

In a sense, social networking Web pages could be considered flattened,
stripped-down projections of such an n-dimensional social space into the
medium of the 2D document.

> Where to?  I think we're destined eventually to become bubbles of
> information in a purely virtual organism that "may" instantiate itself
> as a physical entity as the context demands, and that technology is

I'm not sure if we will become entirely virtual.  That would require us
to give up sex.  :) I don't think we humans will give up such things so
easily.

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|           human <cigar562hfsp952fans@icebubble.org>                  |
|Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
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