Future Work

Of course, in addition to linking everyone's VRML worlds together into one large apparent world, we think it would be interesting to duplicate functions found in the real world. But much remains to be done to accomplish the ideal of a metaverse. Some areas which we would like to address are:

• A ``store'', such as a furniture store, a hardware store, a car dealer, etc., containing models people can use to create or re-model their own space. This is a familiar and intuitive way to organize 3D information and models. If you need to find models of food, navigate to the local supermarket!
• Enforcement of collision detection, creation of ``private'' areas which are password protected?
• Sound, video and other types of data in the virtual world. IVL can also be used for all types of web data, each data type is just a separate object class. Much work needed here.
• Avatars. We would like to define standards for avatars, i.e. how to deal with articulated models in a real-time way. This is do-able with IVL, but requires a new protocol for good results.
• Post-it notes (HTML link with appearance of note) to allow leaving messages for and communicating with others.
• Many more---use your imagination.