I made a bit more progress with:

http://ilrt.org/discovery/rdf-dev/rudolf/rdfviz/

... inspired by FSV and the dinosaur movie and the old Apple/MCF
metadata flythru and god knows what else, I made a VRML prototype
metadata visualizer. This is just a prototype, but its a prototype with a
screenshot (my illegible RDFwebring in 3D running in Mozilla,
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/rdf-dev/rudolf/rdfviz/rdfviz-mozvrml1.jpg)

Disclaimer: getting VRML output from the graph layout engine only
involved my adding '-Tvrml' to the commandline args :-)

I'll have a crack at getting it to lay out the graph in
three (count 'em) dimensions next time I work on this. Should be easy,
I'm told.

So -- big question -- has anyone ever seen a _useful_ VRML
application? Is it worth spending any more time typing to build one from
this stuff?

--danbri



On Sat, 11 Mar 2000, Dan Brickley wrote:

>
> Extremely cool! Am downloading now (with my primitive english bandwidth,
> which is why I can't see what I'm typing as I write this).
> Not-quite-interestingly-enough-to-be-a-spooky-coincidence, I was
> wondering yesterday about status / usability of VRML for this kind of
> application. I tinkered with it years ago and made some silly toy worlds
> to no great effect. Then when I was looking at the GraphViz graph layout
> tool ( http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/
> http://www.research.att.com/~north/cgi-bin/webdot.cgi ) and found out it
> could generate not just bitmaps but also VRML, I was reminded of... that
> Jurassic park 3D flythrough thing :-)
>
> So a couple of neat things to try: hook up FSV to GraphViz so the
> metadata for the visualised files could also be visualised (I made an
> RDF adaptor[1] for GraphViz using Eric's parser); or hook up
> GraphViz-for-metadata's VRML mode to an RDF view of the filesystem and
> reimplement FSV in VRML. Which would require having a decent VRML
> browser for Linux (any recommendations...?)
>
> [time passes... fsv downloads...]
>
> [fsv indexes dan's hard drive]
>
> [more time passes]
>
> FSV's pretty cool. Seems to take a while churning through my filesystem
> and crashes occasionally, but is fancy enough that I'm going to try
> using it for real for a while...
>
> [danbri wanders off to find a VRML browser]
>
> --d
>
>
>
> [1] http://ilrt.org/discovery/rdf-dev/rudolf/rdfviz/ (eventual stable home)
> http://snowball.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~pldab/rdf-dot/ (1/2 finished scratchpad dir)
>
>
> On Sat, 11 Mar 2000, Gerald Oskoboiny wrote:
>
> > Remember that 3D filesystem navigator in the first Jurassic Park?
> > (if not, see: http://www2.best.com/~stevos/rexbig.html )
> >
> > The software behind it was available for download at the time,
> > and I remember installing and playing with it on the SGI Indy's
> > we had in the CMPUT 311 lab, I guess that was back in early 1994.
> > (I'm using a similar machine now as a monitor stand at work. :)
> >
> > I just discovered fsv: http://fox.mit.edu/skunk/soft/fsv/ ,
> > a similar open source version that runs on any modern Unix
> > system. This is the coolest thing I've seen in a while!
> >
> > Screenshots made by the author are here:
> >
> >     http://fox.mit.edu/skunk/soft/fsv/screens.html
> >
> > and I took some snapshots of it running on my home directory:
> >
> > overview in "tree view" mode:
> >
> >     http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/03/11/fsv-tree-view.png
> >
> > overview in "map view" mode:
> >
> >     http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/03/11/fsv-map-view.png
> >
> > "map view" mode, zoomed in on my "mail" directory:
> >
> >     http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2000/03/11/fsv-map-view-zoomed.png
> >
> > I used the fsv-static.bin.gz binary, too lazy to install GL drivers.
> >
> > --
> > Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
> > http://impressive.net/people/gerald/
> >
> >
>
>