Not Cyberspace (yet)
Mark Pesce told David Bennahum in an interview for last month's MEME that he believes we've arrived at a stage where the 3D space designers should take over. We know the examples we have right now are not enough to do the job. We are rabid with ideas, wanting to run but limping.

I am building the Eiffel Tower out of popsicle sticks. Which is the real problem: the poor fit of popsicle sticks to the task or my attempt to force Eiffelness on them? Do I solve it by finding another medium for my tower, or by making a smaller, more abstract piece out of the sticks, one that would sculpt fire into interesting patterns if I burn it?

Popsicle sticks bonded with rebar, coated with copper and wired to a generator. Lights running off another generator, sending color to the thing, motion and images etched onto their surfaces in laser-traced lines. Antennae placed at the top to receive CB radio channels, set to flip through them at intervals and broadcast two at a time to speakers at the base, to create a cacophony of splintered conversations. A phone becomes a dolphin to make a point. This is an entirely new kind of physicality.

Copycat Space
I've entered the 'not clear on the concept zone' The view is pixilated, jaggies everywhere, wireframes pulsing in the distance as new objects load. I can feel my drive's impatience and fatigue, spinning and spinning and spinning with no remorse, sucking images from the net like a milkshake too thick to flow through the straw. The straw goes concave on all sides, collapsing from the force, and I discover to my horror that I've entered the 'not clear on the concept zone.' I am standing on a cyberstreet, one that will never see or need cars, but here it is, because it's an easy, familiar metaphor.

There's a billboard to my left, flashing with lights and getting louder as I approach it.

Enter Chess World, and you become part of a new dimension of 3D performance and rendering speed! Minimum frame rates are a full 60 frames per second, over ten times the median rate in other people's spaces. On a standard PC. Frame rates can be dramatically higher on higher end machines! (Talk to us and we'll sell you one.) How is this possible? Well, the chess board is a single black square, and all the pieces are uniformly shaped cubes, but really, artistic definition costs frame rate! (We'll also sell you a local graphics cache if you wish, so that you can see the shapes. Buy now, and it's 15% off!) Legal moves are programmed into each piece, so you can test a piece's identity simply by moving it! (And we know you chess players generate mental maps of the board that reach across time anyway, with all the graphics you want and the fourth dimension mapped onto the top! What do you need to see it from us for?) We're selling you immediacy. Come get some!

Come and play! Machine or human opponents.

Lots of shimmering text, with arrows to indicate a doorway. I think you walk straight through the text to start the chess applet. The low-res legal notice next to it quotes a high price per use.

I turn away, look to the right. A business park area, a bunch of low, glossy buildings around a garden. Another group of billboards touts office applets -- come here and increase your productivity dramatically! There's an animation built into some of the flowers. They appear as buds, swell, bloom, and die, to be regenerated again. The cycle time is set to 10 seconds, to be sure everyone can see all the stages.

The central billboard:

FormView is the next-generation 3D form designer for the Web! (See the Architectural Park at (540, 312, 270) for FormZView, the 3D modeling applet.) FormView is a revolutionary new tool that allows you to survey your customer base in greater depth than ever before! You can import forms built in other toolkits just to see them in 3D, or create forms from the ground up. Use FormView to rotate forms and view them from any angle, zoom in and out, and modify the roll, pitch, and yaw of any single element or group of elements within the form. CGI scripts connect your 3D forms to any database you wish. It is without a doubt the most advanced form-building tool available. Give your forms that slow spin that really brings in the data!

I run down the street by hitting ctrl-alt-<intended speed, from 1 to 9>. 6 sends me shooting along, lurching a bit until I load each new group of images. I bump it up to 9, and my speed triples because 9 sets a 'don't load anything' flag.

I am accosted by a 3D model, a large bottle of ketchup with animations playing on both its labels. It is a walking ketchup sandwich board, if you will, living the ridiculousness of the pun to its fullest.

The Virtual Ketchup environment uses powerful networking architecture with revolutionary shared state, broadcast capabilities, and voice recognition to power a truly unique new game. Teams of players use the voice reco capabilities to collaboratively navigate a large bottle of ketchup through a room full of food. Who controls the bottle and where the ketchup is poured is an exciting game of wrist speed, with added features like bandwidth recognition of those with faster connections -- if you're on a slow connection, you really should consider calling our 800# and beefing up your system. For ketchup lovers everywhere!

Teleport through me to get to the game!

It chases me away. I ctrl-alt-4 casually, watching my avatar's polygonal feet pound the asphalt below me. Each footfall releases a soft thump and an animation of a cloud of dust rising where I've stepped. This effect can be customized to a huge stomp or a whispering, twirling ballet. It is hollow, expresses nothing, because the excitement of duplicating the movement eclipsed the need for an interface to let the user tie the movements to meaning. We need watercolors, not an open floodgate.

A predatory whirlwind blows down the street. I try to dodge, but my avatar is pulled in. I am taken to a conference room, where a sales avatar welcomes me and tells me that if I stay to see the presentation, I will win a key ring, a check for $25, or a 'Vaporworld' hat for my avatar to wear. The exit door uproots itself and runs to the far end of a long hallway. I tell the salesperson I want the key ring, and I stay, because I know it will be an arduous trip down the hallway if I go. The door returns and the show starts. The avatar, sounding like a real person, speaks.

Use the Vaporworld emulator to prototype programs you have yet to build -- it's the ultimate demo tool, because it has no correspondence whatsoever with whatever you're actually building! Way cooler than just prototyping interfaces! You can fly through 3D mockups of anything, from a new programming environment to a virtual model of a futuristic 'smart house' without writing a line of code in the actual product!

It's the ultimate emulator. You can use it to sell anything.

I rise from my chair in the physical world, and go to get a glass of water. I stare at my hands. The sales avatar has asked me a question; I go back to my desktop to answer, and it's over. I can leave. It can't control me in the physical world. I am teleported back to the street.

Finally, I come to a replica of New York's Times Square. There are animated heaps of trash and beggars accosting my avatar, as the designers wanted to go for the closest they could come to the real thing.

The big screen in the center, where the apple drops at New Year's, is wild with color, sound, and movement. It is advertising...

All the content you could ever want, in one place! Content content! Lots of content! Did we mention all the content? Lots! All kinds of content -- soap operas, murder mysteries (you can even be the victim!), news, virtual and real sports, all the good stories that have been written in the past! We've got everything from Jane Austen to Wassily Kandinsky in 3D!

Still has its edge! Still bites! All the newest forms of experimental media -- we bought 'em! Come in, come in...

I do feel the drive on my desk hurting when it needs a defrag. It is a raw and feeling beast, just like me. And it's all the more alive when its purpose is to lead me to you. It's something else entirely when it leads me to you through a world that we admit is a consensual hallucination, down the rabbit hole into wonderland. But which reality is not a consensual hallucination? This, too, is as old as human history.

Human history is built by humans, for humans, mindful of the audience and the medium. The prehistory of Cyberspace is here, and Pesce has asked us to get it right. I think we can do it.

I am Wile E. Coyote, with a permanent line of credit open to the Acme Everything company. I've been through a lot of anvils.

I am a first-year architecture student, trying to reconcile my ideas of the divine with bureaucratic ideas of seismic safety. The act of making it physical is a consummation, a groundbreaking is a climax, and the construction process speaks to me before it happens. It's dirty and physical and glorious.

I am a painter, expressing truths beyond words in image. I tell stories straight to people's souls. My medium is color, and light, and the carnal knowledge of having brushed every stroke onto the canvas. One stroke at a time, a sensual and luxurious consciousness.

"The things that hurt do not show up on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it." -- Autobiography of Prince Modupe, as cited by Marshall McLuhan

I am an anthropologist, finding humanity and social truth in the shards and detritus of societies. Who will find the first digital pot shard? How do I ask objective questions of a society that takes no physical form? And if they consider me one of them? And if they don't believe in objectivity anyway? What am I to do?

"The map is not the territory."-- Alfred Korzybski

I am a storyteller. My medium is recreated events in life. I tell truths using words to imagine an evocative place, very near here. Here is located in a warm, dark spot, centered between my kidneys, in front of my spine. It is the Manipura Chakra, but it is also the ocean on a warm day, with water and sunlight all around, and passion suffusing the salty spray.

I am a sculptor, telling truth in form. Space and nonspace have equal value, and must be allowed to tell their stories. Can the hand of man ever hope to even speak to nature

I am a software designer, thrilled by the sense of possibility that many layers of people who have gone before have given me. The glory of written language is that it fuels progress. We do not have to repeat discoveries over generations, live at the mercy of the forces of nature. Or do we? Can the hand of man ever hope to even speak to nature? Maybe the net can talk to the earth. We know we can talk to each other. Do we have a quorum?

I am a designer of context, a catalyst to interactivity.

Broadcast is dead. Long live multicast.

"Language is not innocent in our primate order. Indeed, it is said that language is the tool of human self-construction, that which cuts us off from the garden of mute and dumb animals and leads us to name things, to force meanings, to create oppositions, and so craft human culture." -- Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.