WWW3D and the Web Planetarium

2.6 Conclusion

This chapter has described WWW3D, a simple 3D web browser and its evolution into the Web Planetarium. Starting from a humble beginning WWW3D has been changed to address the issues of scalability and producing a more pleasing and informative visualisation. In addition it can now be seen as providing a means for navigating between disjoint 3D worlds as well as between web pages.

However, the current version of the Web Planetarium is not without problems. One major issue is related to the viewing of 2D standard web content. Neither the current 3D view nor the separate browser and 3D views side by side really provide a convenient browsing experience. There is still work to be done to find the optimal way to provide information about web structure and a view on web page contents in an integrated way.

The second problem with the Web Planetarum is that while it is perfectly possible for multiple users to share a single instance of the Web Planetarium there is no support given to the interrelation of different planetaria nor to different views on the same planetarium. The use of subjective visualisations (Jää-Aro and Snowdon, 2001) may provide a technique for merging planetaria since the same web page could be presented differently to different users, thus preserving individual layouts while allowing a degree of interaction between users.