**2. Building 3-D cyberspace in the 1990s**

I had leveraged a paper I published entitled "VRML As a Superset of HTML: An Approach to Consolidation" to first gain access to researchers at the HIT Lab [4]. That paper suggested that 3-D cyberspace might be a useful veneer for organizing all the 2-D content that was rapidly being amassed and distributed in the early years of the World Wide Web. The lab investigated that opportunity from a high-tech perspective, but many of us there shared a vision regarding lower cost implementations.

In 1994, the HIT Lab collaborated with a Fujitsu research lab to build a shared 3-D cyberspace, named GreenSpace, shared by participants meeting there while physically in Seattle and Tokyo [5]. A Silicon Graphics Onyx machine hosted that cyberspace's visual content and processed the various peripherals that immersed each participant in VR. Four dedicated ISDN phone lines passed voice and data packets between the two locations on opposite sides of the Pacific to create a shared presence. Open Inventor software facilitated the building and management of the cyberspace experience. The lab celebrated upon demonstrating that two groups of people could share an experience in 3-D cyberspace with a million dollars' investment of technology.

A year later, eight members of the HIT Lab got together to work on a version of GreenSpace that could run on Pentium 2 Intel personal computers, using a graphics accelerator board, and the emergent World Wide Web. The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan provided the funding, the graphics boards, and a couple of highly-capable collaborators to work with us to find a common ground culture for the distributed cyberspace we created. Our team comprised of two computer scientists, an information scientist, an artist, three virtual world designers, and an architect who eventually married an architect on the GreenSpace team.

We worked with Pentium 2 hardware early in the project but soon got the desktop VR experiences running on Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corp, and other UNIX-flavored machines, thanks to Java 3D software and its capable Java virtual machine that made cross-platform applications easier to develop. The first experience we created on the Virtual Playground framework was a virtual outdoor mall that included embedded web browsers that streamed 2-D and 3-D content on virtual billboards.

The billboards could render most web pages that were HTML-driven, as well as show VRML-based 3-D models and examples of video on some of the underlying hardware flavors. We named that virtual world Netgate Mall and spent significant time discussing what culture we would like to enable for visitors who came to visit through Internet communication channels [6].

Upon sharing Netgate Mall with our research partners in Taiwan, an artist collaborator there built a Taiwanese version of the visual architecture for the mall that shared the same bounding boxes for navigation pathways (**Figure 1**). As had been demonstrated with GreenSpace, 3-D cyberspace on the desktop could be configurable, and thus personalized, without degrading human communications for many applications. We used the Taiwanese version to run a shared cyberspace world for 10–14 year-old children to use in Taiwan, with a general public access point in a Kaohsiung museum for those who did not have access to the hardware and bandwidth otherwise.

Sun Microsystems provided a phone hotline to us so we could call them anytime with questions or feature requests related to developing and debugging Java 3D-based applications. Within 18 months, we had used Java 3D and a framework of core Virtual Playground modules to create a virtual cadaver lab [7], virtual watershed world [8],

#### **Figure 1.**

*Netgate Mall Taiwanese version based on Virtual Playground software.*

and to integrate our applications to comply with an open 3-D cyberspace interaction specification developed through a California-based creative commons (**Figure 2**). A computer science undergraduate student ported much of the Virtual Playground GUI API architecture from Java to C++ to create BlueSpace, which then let him extend the head's up display and terrain engine.

Digitalspace hosted a workshop of the third annual digital biota conference [9] for attendees who were interested in standardizing the usability methods of desktop VR and messaging that coordinated the virtual experience between 3-D cyberspace participants. We adapted our flavors of 3-D cyberspace technologies to validate the specification and focus the creative commons on expanding the project base in which the specification could be verified. We spent a lot of time together in 3-D cyberspace envisioning possible futures.

I worked on demonstrating an in-browser solution that could provide a desktop VR entry point for participants who had not had any 3-D content experiences. A team in Turin, Italy created a native Java engine that supported 3-D cyberspace experiences. The whole engine could be downloaded in less than 100 kilobytes to plug-in to the standard Java virtual machine. Another team outside of Melbourne, Australia created the 3-D models that conformed to the engine's content loading functionality. We developed JavaScript code that drove the user experience through an HTML skin and made the skin configurable.

The first application we made available with a web-browser based engine was a configurable classroom intended to be shared by school teachers who were thinking through ramifications of the Columbine school shooting. The funder also provided a

#### **Figure 2.**

*Screenshots of example 1990s-era HIT Lab experiences in 3-D cyberspace. Virtual Big Beef Creek (on left) coordinated planning and geospatial organization of physical data collection (with accessible 3-D photographic perspectives). Virtual Cadaver Lab expanded a popular 2-D interactive anatomy atlas into 3-D cyberspace where self-testing was possible for learning taxonomical awareness of gross anatomy characteristics.*

discussion room for school teachers to discuss their retirement investments and the insurance products provided by their employer.

The lab also maintained a virtual world created with the VRML plug-in and LiveConnect facilities provided by the Netscape web browser [10]. That world ran well enough for us to run masters' thesis experiments with four synchronous participants connected in 3-D cyberspace at a time—exploring hypotheses negotiated with an advisement committee. Soon after, Netscape lost significant market share as Microsoft's web browser took over as the leading market share browser on personal computers running the Windows operating system.
