**4. Building 3-D cyberspace today**

Upon revisiting the thoughts from earlier days of building 3-D cyberspace experiences in a research lab, we consider advancements in computing, development tools, and communications protocols. We see an expansion of VR peripherals into the hands, and onto the heads, of the general public. To build a 3-D cyberspace to support the Metaverse, or a local community preparedness awareness, we have many options to advance the process from the technologies we used previously.

A popular approach among our students, and the students of other teaching colleagues, for creating virtual reality experiences is by way of a pipeline approach where 3-D models are generated in freely downloadable modeling software (e.g. Blender), brought into other freely downloadable software (e.g. Unity Engine) to become part of a 3-D application, and then ported to a VR environment (e.g. Oculus) to be experienced immersively.

At the time of the hospital evacuation simulation software use, a 3-D hospital model (X3D format) was available for participants to explore within a web browser, but participants preferred the 2-D floor layouts that we provided for testing the usefulness of simulation software. Since then, the popularity of the three.js, webGLenabled 3-D, library makes a hospital model integration easier [17]. For example, the same 3-D hospital model can be used within a Java-based application, JavaScriptbased application, and Unity Engine-based application.

**Figure 4** shows a 3-D model of one floor of the simulation software hospital, loaded within the Blender software in which the model is iterated upon to improve the design. The model can be exported to OBJ, GlTF, or any other file format for which the three.js library has developed a loader service to rapidly get it inside of a JavaScript-driven 3-D experience.

The Unity Engine-based application is readily made available for virtual reality use by way of XR plug-ins available from the online Unity Store. Android build support readily enables Oculus flavor VR from both Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. The Unity Engine can also import OBJ and GlTF file formats to enable interactive 3-D experiences that are OpenXR compliant. As a result, a 3-D cyberspace readily provides a virtual hospital in which to have meaningful experiences such as preparing for an emergency evacuation (**Figure 5**).

Because our resultant experience is OpenXR compliant, we could pursue extending it's usefulness through dissemination by way of other delivery formats such as A-Frame [18] and Networked A-Frame [19]. At the time of this writing, Collabora, HTC, Microsoft, Oculus, SteamVR, and Varjo provided OpenXR runtimes in which 3-D Cyberspace experiences could be delivered [20].

As we watched participants perform the virtual hospital evacuation activity, we noticed participants using the 2-D interface effectively without any apparent cognitive difficulties. All participants were given versions of the software to practice its

*Enabling a 3-D Cyberspace Experience Online DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102416*

#### **Figure 4.**

*One floor of the simulation's emergency evacuation hospital as contained in a 3-D model for 3-D cyberspace use, as seen within the Blender software used to embellish and maintain it.*

#### **Figure 5.**

*An immersive cyberspace perspective of the 3-D model seen in Figure 3. Detail is faithfully rendered as part of an early iteration in preparation for use. The left image provides view into a patient room. The right image provides the view from a hallway corridor.*

use, but participants reported they only needed 2 h at most to feel comfortable as the interface was built from artifacts (maps, forms, and other documents) that participants used regularly in equivalent paper-based formats.

To gain confidence in suggesting a 3-D interface would be useful, we thought about our own time spent recording time and motion data associated with moving about in the hospital and in evacuating human beings with their necessary equipment (wheelchairs, gurneys, respirators, etc.). Having spent time doing those tasks, we could readily cognate about them with the 2-D interface. But we could not do so easily beforehand.

We forget that as humans we had to learn how to use 2-D maps as abstractions of the 3-D physical world they represent. As a result, we learn differently through 2-D abstractions than we learn interacting with the physical world. A goal in using an emergency response simulator is to improve learning with regards to the activities, context, and heuristics associated with a scenario. Some compelling evidence

from neuroscience experiments suggests 3-D adds additional value even when a 2-D interface is available [21]. Conclusions reached include:

*"A key finding is that 2-D and 3-D neuroanatomical brain models were perceived differently. 3-D learning yielded greater object recognition, perhaps from stereopsis facilitating visual recognition. Exclusive use of 3-D models should be avoided when instead teaching that includes both 2-D and 3-D is likely the most advantageous to promote generalization of knowledge by forcing students to practice fluidly between dimensions."*

Another recent study of 3-D virtual environment interfaces concluded that "findings showed different condition correlations with the traditional tasks and the comparison between the two systems have revealed that 3-D is able to generate lower reaction times, higher correct answers, and lower preservative responses in attentional abilities, inhibition control, and cognitive shifting than the 2-D condition" [22].

Common sense suggests that mental fluidity is valuable under the urgent response demands of a community-wide emergency response scenario.

### **5. Conclusion**

We perform a thought experiment to consider the evolution of 3-D interfaces forward in time to when they would be a more dominant norm. We imagine that once 2-D interfaces no longer need to be learned for many day-to-day activities, participants would not be fluent in their use. Other large primates have an easier time using 3-D interfaces than 2-D interfaces, which seems reasonable because they have not encountered the 2-D abstractions in their day-to-day lives.

As a species we have built a cyberspace that is primarily made up of one-dimensional text and two-dimensional documents. Today's cyberspace is entrenched in part by that history and the expectation we have created that the destinations we want to visit will be 2-D at most. As a species we have also created an extensive number of 3-D models and have developed technologies to better capture physical 3-D reality in a virtual facsimile. Google Street View technology enables 3-D exploration along street locations whereby maps of our physical world provide context. Run a virtual reality application and that widely shared data provides a primitive 3-D cyberspace experience that has the promise of getting more mature rapidly. Of course large corporations continue to work on their own versions of a Metaverse using their proprietary hardware and software as well.

With a web-accessed 3-D cyberspace available, 3-D computer graphics take on additional value as a potential contribution to useful cyberspace experiences. Whether they are used for that purpose grows as a cultural question but shrinks as a technical question as a result of our progress. Exploring the cultural question rapidly expands into many sub-questions—many of which are perhaps useful to consider anyway:

1.What are we trying to accomplish as a species?


The potential use and reuse of computer graphics grows as the interest in connected 3-D cyberspace grows. When revisiting the emergence of the worldwide web in the early 1990s, we remember computer graphics integrating to create a cyberspace that felt like a global encyclopedia of information resources. The potential exists to revisit that time with today's 3-D technologies available so as to develop other trajectories of world wide information connectivity, with computer graphics providing a sense of continuous 3-D space in which to provide meaningful experiences. The reader is encouraged to participate in its development and exploration.
