A Back Button For 3D Online Spaces?
Trevor Smith, a former Xerox PARC researcher who’s busy creating Ogoglio, a project that explores “shared [3D] online worlds in the context of web enabled work,” has an interesting post about the concept of the back button in what he calls “3spaces.”
If you’ve been wandering around in a shared 3space for twenty minutes, what should happen when you press the back button? Should your POV shift back along the 3D path you’ve taken? What is the granularity of the history? Are its units ones of time, space, dwell time, or 3space landmark? Or, is it a continuous path? Is the beginning of the history at your entrance point to this 3space, or at the entrance to the first 3space in this browser session? Where is the balance between an understandable user concept of “back” and an engineer-able artifact of a back button and history?
I almost think a back button for a place like Second Life is not unthinkable — though it’s not quite possible yet. [UPDATE: I’m wrong! There already is one! See the comments thread.] If you combined a location-tracking service like SLStats with some in-world landmarking and teleportation tools, you could possibly have a back button return you to the sim you’d last visited, to the place you’d last teleported to, or (probably my preference) to the place you’d last teleported from. “If this hasn’t already been the topic for a PhD thesis, I imagine it soon will be,” Trevor says. I’m not so sure about that, but it’s certainly fascinating food for thought.
Feeds
Ah, Mark! Yumi Murakami made a back button for Second Life in the form of an HUD–she calls it a BijoRewind and I’ve used it. Instructionals are as follows:
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Thanks very much for purchasing BijoRewind!
SETUP
Remove the BijoRewind from the box and “Wear” it. Note that when first worn, there will be no buttons on
the BijoRewind HUD panel, because you haven’t yet teleported anywhere to be able to come back from.
When you start to teleport around, the back and forward buttons will appear on the HUD.
(The “BijoRewind Mini” is an alternative version of the BijoRewind that’s much, much smaller and doesn’t
display the logo on your HUD - it just fits into a really tiny space in the corner. When you attach the
Mini for the first time, you won’t see anything at all, because the buttons haven’t appeared yet and there
IS no HUD panel for the Mini version. When you teleport, you’ll see the buttons.)
USAGE
BijoRewind behaves just like the “back” and “forward” buttons on a browser. If you’ve teleported somewhere,
click on the Back button and your old location will be displayed on the map; click “Teleport” to teleport back
there. The “Forward” button will only work if you’ve previously gone “Back”, and will return you to
where you were before you went back.
BijoRewind tracks 10 locations, so you can go back up to 9 times in a row.
A few notes:
- BijoRewind can only track your history when you’re wearing it. If you teleport without it on, you can’t
wear it afterwards and go back. So make sure to wear it all the time :)
- BijoRewind tries to teleport you as near as possible to where you came from. However, the owners of
land areas have the option to limit people’s ability to teleport into them - this most frequently happens in
residential areas, to stop people teleporting into other people’s houses. In this case, BijoRewind’s teleport
will be redirected to the location the landowner has specified.
- In some exceptional cases, where a large parcel of land (such as a private island) has a landing point set,
BijoRewind will be unable to track your teleport at all. In this case, when you go back, BijoRewind will treat your teleport as
if you’d gone to an entirely new location. This is a limit of SL and should happen only in very rare and
exceptional circumstances; I’m working on a way around this. Please let me know if it occurs in any particular
areas.
If you have any difficulties or questions with BijoRewind, please IM Yumi Murakami.
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Oh that’s awesome, Torley, thanks for clueing me in!
What a small, small world. Trevor and I went to college together! He’s one of the most utterly brilliant people I know. Why, he’s nearly as fantastic as I am! And that’s saying something.
That’s 3pointD: connecting people in 3D online spaces!
BiJoRewind is an interesting attempt to heal the wounds in our spatial memory which are inflicted by teleportation.
Wow, Trevor, that is some metaversal poetics if ever I’ve heard any. Love it.
See? I told you he was nearly as fantastic as me! I took him on a tour inworld (in SL) and set his mind a-buzzin. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with, in world or out.