Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!jarthur!usc!samsung!sdd.hp.com!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!brucec%phoebus.phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET From: brucec%phoebus.phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Bruce Cohen;;50-662;LP=A;) Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds Subject: Re: "Space" Message-ID: Date: 10 Aug 90 22:21:47 GMT References: <9007250107.AA01311@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu> Sender: hlab@milton.u.washington.edu Organization: Tektronix Inc. Lines: 84 Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu In article wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) writes: > First some background: I came to the cyberspace party from the field of > software engineering, particularly large-scale software engineering. This > led me to have an interest in the visualization, manipulation, and > navigation of large amounts of abstract information. That matches my background pretty well: I'm a software engineer with an interest in user interfaces to large, complexly- or ill-structured assemblages of information. With luck, we can talk the same language. > ... > > The problem is that this kind of thing rapidly breaks down in the world of > large-scale software engineering. When you have system that's composed of > hundreds of source modules, millions of code lines, thousands of test > programs, tens of thousands of bug reports and fixes and enhancements (not > to mention the mountain of documentation, design, and specification that > came before and along with the code) - well, you can see the problem. Even worse, the most urgent part of the job is often to try to strain out relationships from this mound of, er, "stuff". Things like percentage of test failures per module as a function of time, or network load as a function of mean-time-between revision for a subsystem (the utility of this information is left as an exercise for the reader). Problem being: if you didn't know you would want this information before the project started, do you have the tools to to extract it? > ... > > This is just the visualization problem. The manipulation and navigation > problems are as large or larger, but let's deal with things one at a time. > My experience shows that setting up a good visualization structure can > suggest interaction means that were not thought of beforehand. > Agreed, but that still doesn't address navigation, which is the nastiest of all the problems in my opinion. The whole reason for spatial metaphors is to allow users to apply their highly-evolved spatial perception and visualization systems to the navigation problem. These systems, though, are evolved to handle relatively circumscribed local areas, which may be somewhat, though not arbitrarily, cluttered (like the space in the branches of a temperate zone forest?). They break down in high-dimensional, large hyper-volume spaces. We don't as yet know what aids can help this, or how to optimally filter the perceptions of such spaces for easy navigation. The current best choice seems to be to "project" (in some sense not necessarily related to projective geometry) the navigation space onto some less complex space the user can handle, and provide disambiguation for the inevitable overloaded volumes. I think you need to consider this up front when investigating the spatial qualities of a cyberspace. No matter how interesting a space may be from the viewpoint of abstract organization, if users can't find their way through the maze, it's not a useful space. > ... > > Because the properties of the objects are (more or less) mathematically > describable, we can then say interesting things about the dimensions of > cyberspace. Well, as I implied above, there may be more than one brand of cyberspace. In fact, I'd say it's inevitable that there will be, from market forces alone (but that's another discussion). If the desired qualities of a space are determined by the objects within it, then it follows that different collections of objects should reside in different kinds of space. Maybe what we are calling cyberspace is just an anteroom filled with doors and rabbitholes into these spaces ... > ... > > There are lots of issues here, such as: what about ordering? what kinds of > dimensions should there be? what about properties that are not confined to > a single object, but are the result of object-interaction (such as the > property earlier-version-of, an important concept in software engineering). Yes, please, I'd like to hear your thinking on all these issues. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: USE THIS ADDRESS TO REPLY, REPLY_TO IN HEADER IS BROKEN! Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab email: brucec@tekcrl.labs.tek.com Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc. phone: (503)627-5241 M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR 97077