VRMosaic: Web access from within a virtual environment

For the foreseeable future, users of virtual reality systems will likely spend more time in the “real” environment than in a virtual environment. In the “real” environment, users access much of their data using flat screen applications, which include tools such as authoring and analysis programs and even hyperlinked browsers. We believe that users will find VEs more appealing if they can import their flat screen applications. We also believe that the World Wide Web infrastructure, and supporting tools such as NCSA Mosaic, Netscape's Navigator, and Sun's HotJava, have become a de facto standard both for making data available and allowing limited interaction with that data. These beliefs motivated us to develop a technology for porting flat screen applications based on the 3.1 version of the InterViews toolkit into VR. NCSA Mosaic provided us with a real application that would: (1) test our infrastructure effectively; and (2) provide a compelling application example. We used our “2D interface in VR” infrastructure to port Mosaic into RealEyes, our VR system. Dubbed “VRMosaic”, this application lets users familiar with Mosaic access the Web from within an immersive VE. But VRMosaic is not just an embedded version of NCSA Mosaic-it also allows for VR specific features such as navigation within the VE