I think it's possible that vision is closer to the real future than that sounds at face value. I also initially thought of lawnmower man era breathless predictions for VRML and mockups of the future 3D internet. But this is actually a surprisingly compelling experience. Is it wrong I kind of like that almost everything from the browsing experience of reddit is removed except the titles and the linked content? It's got a pleasing simplicity and the tangible nature of making the internet a physical place is appealing to my primitive brain somehow. Definitely not my new way to browse the web, but surprisingly charming.
We definitely should, although probably from a completely different perspective than ‘94: High end phones can capture in 3D, so we should be able to store and view 3D images properly.
I’m starting with the idea of PNGs where the channels represent RGBZ instead of RGBA, but obviously we need more than 8 bits of depth information, and we are starting to get and care about high dynamic range for RGB data as well… would 16R:16G:16B:16Z work?
There’s also the point that depth information will have sharp boundaries, and it will probably be much worse for RGB information to blur over such a boundary as compared with the equivalent parts of a flat JPEG.
Yeah I remember trying a demo that was literally trying to do this, just on our Mac Performa 5200 over a 14.4 modem (you had to pre-download the "map"). Even the design is eerily similar.
Suggestion: the enter key should focus the chat box (like a FPS game) so you don't have to hit escape then click on it.