Old school cyberspace embed its own architecture
Alex Pang is working on the very intriguing topic of “The End of Cyberspace” (there is a short piece about it in Wired today). In one of his blogposts, he’s wondering about the names that we given to cyberspace (the ultimate goal is to find a new concept for what is now cyberspace: ubicomp…).
Concerning cyberspace names, I looked back at some old role playing games I had both in english and french, dated from end of 80’s and 90’s. There are names like ‘virtual world’, “the grid’, “the matrix”, “cyberspace” and so forth. Sometimes, the names of the artifacts gives the idea of the concept (in “information superhighway” that I really like, it makes me remembering by grandmother who kept asking me “where are those superhighways”).
An important thing I guess is the difference or the mix between the idea of a virtual space and its physical representation (as for instance a network of cable or fibers) and the virtual counterpart (information flow).
About this, it’s interesting to see that the first representations of virtual reality embed the concept of the cyberspace architecture (in a more perfect way of course). Networked virtual reality is made of wires/cables/fibers (to connect computers) and it’s really represented as a grid/matrix. Check those pictures (Space Harriers and Tron):
The ground of this virtual space is - actually - a grid.
January 25th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
I very like 3D
January 25th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
Wendy Carlos did the music to Tron? Wow, it was even more significant a cultural icon than I realized….
The grid metaphor shows up in lots of games– Spectre and Spectre VR (which I spent a huge amount of time playing), a couple of Tron games that I played, and innumerable others.
Obviously it was relatively easy to program, but I think it had a couple unintended consequences: subtly reinforcing the underlying rationality and logic of the game, and creating an impression of infinite distance– that you could explore this world, sparse as it is, forever.
September 17th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
I work for Linden Lab, who makes Second Life (http://secondlife.com) and our world is literally a grid configuration, because that’s how it appears on the World Map.
I really loved playing Spectre VR too. Sure wish I could find the map editor for that!