The Hallway

Click here to enter The Hallway.
(be sure you have a VRML player installed before clicking the above link)

Note - the Cortona Player appears to have a render problem in many browsers on Mac OSX (the view port is shifted upwards), however you can still navigate the scene. It works OK in Firefox and Deskbrowse. I have not tested it on Windows, feedback would be appreciated!

SGI users can use the Cosmo Player plugin with Netscape 4.76; copy and paste this link to access the vrml world directly: http://www.jonathanmortimer.co.uk/personal/hallway.html

Background

This was primarily an experiment in virtual 3D interfaces. I kind of knew that VRML was still very much a minority technology and probably would never be widely accepted on the PC, but there were still people out there experimenting and making virtual worlds online which used numerous extensions and new versions of the original VRML developed by SGI some years before.

The idea was to include the actual pages on the walls as pictures, one could glide over and zoom in to view the web page there and then, but the technology defeated me and this was not possible with the VRML that I knew, even now I do not believe it would be possible to browse actual web pages from within a VRML 3D world. So a compromise was made - have screen shots depicting the web pages and a hyperlink, so that clicking on the picture in the VRML world would take you to the web page in a standard browser window. It worked quite well, and showed that it could provide quite an interesting alternative method of navigating a site, although for general web browsing still too slow and cumbersome for most people. I had an idea that instead of web pages in a hallway one could have paintings or photos in a wood panelled room, complete with arm chair and roaring fireplace! Dynamic lighting, obviously, and high-detail pictures so that zooming in did not degrade the quality. I actually made a start on this idea but lost my work in a freak accident (accidentally wiped my hard drive, erk!)