Category: Cosma

Cosma’s Golden Jubilee!

~ mehopper ~ 1 Comment

It’s Cosma’s Birthday!

Cosma came into being through an accident of confluence fifty years ago.

I happened to be working in a library, and I got deeply enamored with the power of using the Dewey Decimal System to navigate it.

Then I was also exposed to the spatial game Empire on the PLATO system.

Viola!

It struck me that it would be SO cool to make a game where “knowledge is a place” that you can navigate with addresses like you can in “planned cities” like Indianapolis where I grew up.

It would be a fictional city using Dewey Decimal for addresses so that everyone could navigate knowledge as naturally as they do planned cities.

Making knowledge a place would democratize it!

I’ve been working on making “knowledge a place” ever since. The concept has evolved a LOT over the years, but this was the original spark. Of course, I also found out along the way that I am not the only one with an idea like this — there’s a very, very long history of such things.

I noticed that the anniversary of my “big idea” was approaching while I was working on Cosma’s new Welcome Area that I dubbed Knowledge Lobby.

I got nostalgic and played around with what a “real life” exhibit about Cosma might look like. Then that thought experiment snowballed into an exercise in visualization.

Note that most objects are visual links to the Web!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

This week I got even more nostalgic and decided to write a post to share a bit more information about the history and evolution of Cosma.

Oooops, I did it, again — it snowballed, too 🙂

Check out the results on the new Timeline page!

So, how will we celebrate this Jubilee?

Take a short break and get back to expanding and posting on Cosma!

Happy Birthday to Cosma & Cheers to You!

Cosma is not a funded project — money is neither requested nor accepted, so there is no budget for publicity.

The only request is that you please tell other people about it.

Thank you!

Visit     About | Worlds | Adventures | Contents | Index

© M. E. Hopper

Athena’s Chamber & Muses’ Tea Party

~ mehopper

You are cordially invited to explore the two newest additions to the pantheon of Cosma’s Web Worlds.

They are both reimaginings of earlier Toy Worlds.

Just touch the 360° images to explore them!

Athena’s Chamber is a reimagining of Athena’s Office.

Muses’ Tea Party is a reimagining of Muses’ Playroom.

Enjoy!

You can also (re)visit Cosma’s Knowledge Navigation Center!

Touch posters and objects to find out about them or visit other worlds.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

About | Worlds | Adventures | Contents | Index

Cosma is not a funded project — money is neither requested nor accepted, so there is no budget for publicity.

The only request is that you please tell other people about it.

Thank you!

© M. E. Hopper

Cosma’s Knowledge Lobby!

~ mehopper

Check out Cosma’s brand new Knowledge Lobby!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Here’s a quick backstory about it.

I’ve been “making knowledge a place” for a long time, so at this point Cosma features MANY 3D worlds that enable spatial navigation of the Cosma site and other content on the Web.

Recently I’ve been upgrading my old Toy Worlds to somewhat parallel Web Worlds.

For example, here’s the “Walk in Art” Toy World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was cute for what it was, but limited.

Here is the newer, expanded “Walk in Art & Museums” Web World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

You get the idea.

This Welcome Area is one of the few Toy Worlds that I hadn’t upgraded to a Web World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

It is essentially a 3D version of Cosma’s 2D Showcase page that has links to sample pages, and it has been the primary interface to Cosma since 2018. It was overdue for an overhaul.

Again, here’s the same new Web World as above for comparison.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Notice that there is a (not very well hidden) trap door that leads to another new Web World.

Next year marks a major milestone in Cosma’s development, so I was playing around with what a real life exhibit about it would look like. Then my simple thought experiment snowballed into this elaborate exercise in visualization.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Of course, every object is a visual link to something on the Web.

What better place to put such a thing than below the new Welcome Area, right?

It serves as an extended, visual “About” page.

So that’s the story behind Cosma’s new “Knowledge Lobby” and the cellar beneath it.

Now the majority of my Toy Worlds have been upgraded to Web Worlds.

Although, there are still a few more to go …

Stay Tuned!

Corn Mazed!

~ mehopper ~ 1 Comment

Step into my latest Web World!

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring.

You can also see it on Kuula.

Backstory

I’ve made a LOT of Web Worlds over the last few years. You can see them here.

They are fun to make and use, but the navigation is fairly simplistic.

However, I know better things are possible.1

Last week I decided to figure out how to make more complex “Myst-like” creations.

The process of learning and practicing the new techniques was a tad tedious.

So, I took a break, and my September is Corny post was the dubious result.

What I failed to mention in the post was just how lost I got in corn mazes.

It was ludicrous — it turned into way more than the tiny break it was supposed to be!

Dr. Mary’s Handy Dandy Guide to Corn Mazes below was the result.

Then along the way I happened to Google “How to Make a Corn Maze.”

I REALLY got lost in that, and then, lo and behold, it hit me.

Making a corn maze would be an excellent way to practice my newly minted technical skills!

Voilà, my new Corn Maze above was the result.

As for how long it will take you to explore it, no worries.

It is tiny — it isn’t even the size of a city block.

It will probably only take you a few minutes to finish.

Only time will tell how much larger my future Web Worlds will get, though 😉

I have made some fairly extensive “Knowledge Places” in the past (e.g. Knowledge Paradise).

Enjoy!

Dr. Mary’s Handy Dandy Guide to Corn Mazes

Encyclopedia

Corn Maze (Wikipedia)

Inspiration

Life Lessons in a Corn Maze (Kelsey Luing, Boston.com)

Guide

Pro Tips: How Not to Get Lost in a Corn Maze (Kelsey Luing, Boston.com)

Here some links to help you find a corn maze near you.

Corn Mazes in Massachusetts (Boston Central)
Which corn maze is the best? Vote now! (USA Today)

Science

7 Incredible NASA Corn Mazes: Cool Crop Circles for Science (Nancy Atkinson, Universe Today)

Commerce

Corn Maze a Cash Crop For Farmers (The Weather Channel)

Product

Corn Maze (Etsy)

History

Inside the Weird World of Corn Mazes (Roxanne Hoorn, Atlas Obscura)

Library

Corn Maze (Library Thing)

Corn Maze (WorldCat)

Education

Ten Lessons for Teaching Geography Using Corn Mazes (U.S. Geological Survey)
Design a Corn Maze (Where The Teaching Things Are)

Occupation

Farmers Turn to Professionals to Cut Corn Mazes (NJ.com, YouTube Video)

News

Corn Mazes (JSTOR)
Corn Mazes (NPR Archives)

Competition

Best Corn Maze (USA 10 Best)

Game

Corn Maze Games (The Corn Maze Guy)

Poem

OEDILF: The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

1.   The owl and the end of the maze is my homage to the mascot of the 3D MIT’s Athena/Muse software and associated applications which I studied during my doctoral research and also worked on as an MIT employee in the 1990s.

Hike, Wander & Walk-in the Web!

~ mehopper

Welcome to Web Worlds@Cosma!

The pages of Cosma have links to many thousands of the best resources on the Web.

Immersive 3D and 360° experiences are among the most valuable types of resources, and so there are links to thousands of them distributed across the hundreds of pages on the Web site.

The Web Worlds@Cosma are thematic 360° images with visual links to a sample of ten to twenty of the best Immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web for a specific subject.

There are many Web Worlds distributed across the pages on the Cosma Web site.

The Web World below is a special one with links to many of the others.

There are hundreds of immersive 3D and 360° experiences to explore!

Click on objects to see 3D and 360° experiences, and click doorways to go to other Web Worlds.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

If you’ve been following Cosma, then you know that Web Worlds have been evolving over the course of the last year. Continue reading below to learn the story behind them.

———————–
New Worlds, Old Ways@MEHopper

The story of Web Worlds began while I was updating my MEHopper Web site last summer.

I had been playing around with virtual home staging software and noticed that some of the spaces looked as if they were generated in the virtual world SecondLife. It was neat to see that “nearly” photorealistic 360° images could be generated and exported from that system.

I’ve used SecondLife to create Knowledge Places for decades, and I knew that it was now possible to take and download 360° photos, but I hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet.

I finally got inspired to do it and started with (re)creating my MEHopper Gallery Toy World. Toy Worlds are dioramas created with dollhouse furniture and other miniature objects that are photographed with a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera. The resulting 360° photos are posted on Kuula to overlay links to the Web.

Sure enough, I was able to take a 360° picture in SecondLife and upload it to Kuula to add links in the same way that I had for the Toy World. The result was this new MEHopper Gallery.

Click on the pictures to read posts about when and where they were taken.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Web Worlds@New Media Museum

The experiment was successful enough that I decided to try my hand at another one.

This time it was for a space for my New Media Museum Web site. I had experimented with making virtual museums using my own museum’s content, but this time the goal was to create an interface to other computer museums.

This goal also inspired me to resurect my idea of “Magic Doors” from my work in SecondLife. You can read about the history of them on the Knowledge Objects page.

M.E.Hopper's Magic Window in SecondLife 2006
M.E.Hopper's Magic Window Farm in SecondLife 2006

The result of this experiment was the Computer Museums Lobby below, and you can read the story about why this came about in this post on my New Media Museum Web site.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, objects to learn about them, “i”s to learn about the museums, and doors to enter the virtual museums.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was around this time that it dawned on me that Web Worlds was a good term for describing the 3D interfaces that I was creating in SecondLife and Kuula to make visual links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web. I did some research and found that the term had been used to describe virtual worlds on the Web before, and so I decided that it was the right term to use for what I was doing.

———————–
Web Worlds@Cosma

It wasn’t long after the term Web Worlds stuck that I decided Cosma needed some of them.

One major goal of Cosma is to have 3D interfaces for spatial Knowledge Navigation of the resources on Cosma and other Web sites. The history of this work is on the Worlds page.

There are currently a series of Toy Worlds that serve as 360° visual interfaces for the major content areas of Cosma. There is also a Cosma Welcome Area Toy World on the front page of Cosma that has links to the others.

However, there are some content areas that don’t have Toy Worlds. That’s because I never got around to making them, and this has bugged me for awhile. Web Worlds struck me as a way to remedy the situation.

The idea of “Magic Doors” as links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences came in handy, too. I’ve been adding links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the pages of Cosma for about five years, and there are thousands of them distributed across the Web site. Unfortunately, few people notice them because the links to amazing experiences blend in with more mundane links (Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Open Courseware, JSTOR etc.). I decided that Web Worlds with visual links could be a way to bring more attention the links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences.

I happened to be updating the Transportation pages, and it was one of the content areas with no Toy World. I also happened to have tons of cool objects in SecondLife to use for the job (Cars, Trains, Boats, Planes etc.). It wasn’t long before Transit Paradise was born.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

One limitation of my approach to making Web Worlds reared it’s ugly head, though.

You can only cram so many doors and objects into a single 360° photo.

This result was that there wasn’t enough room for all of the Transportation content, and I decided that Space Transportation needed to go into a separate Web World.

I was also updating the Space pages at the time and decided to address another weakness. While the existing Solar Extremes Toy World was a fine interface for the Solar System pages, there were some pages related to Astronomy that weren’t included in it.

Ultimately Space Transportation and Astronomy were combined into Space Depot.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Soon after that I was working on the Library page and saw experiences there begging for attention. The Great Libraries Antechamber resulted, and the post Little, Big, Old, Spooky Libraries explains more about it.

———————–
Hike the Web!

November 17th is National Take a Hike Day, and I planned a post to highlight some virtual hikes on the Web. A Web World with doors to those and some parks seemed like a nice idea, and so Hiking Trails Hall came into being.

I was also updating the pages in the Nature section of Cosma around that time, and I thought it would be good to make Web Worlds to emphasize the links to experiences quietly lurking about on those pages.

For example, there were links to 3D tours of Natural History Museums on the Dinosaur page, and so a Web World for accessing Natural History Museums seemed like a “should do.”

The Plant, Flower and Tree pages had links to some lovely Botanical Gardens, so Botanical Gardens Orangery was an obvious choice for another Web World.

There were many links to fun experiences on the Animal pages that needed attention. I also happened to already have some very cute animals in my inventory in SecondLife, so Critter’s Hollow was a no-brainer.

Finally, I created this Nature Center to integrate and access the four separate Web Worlds and introduced it in the Hike the Web post.

Touch doors and objects to enter 360° virtual experiences, touch “i”s to learn more, and touch arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Beach Bum Break

Then came January, in New England, and this year was worse than usual! 🙁

I’m a hopeless “beach person.” That’s why there’s even a Beach page on Cosma.

I couldn’t go visit beaches with warm weather, so making Enchanted Beach Hut, Enchanted Beach Shack and the Enchanted Beach House below were therapy. You can read about it in My Enchanted Beach Houses post.

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters and objects to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It turned out that my beach adventures weren’t just therapy — they also inspire the design of the largest Web Worlds creation so far …

———————–
Wander the Web@Wanderlust!

Later in January I got busy slogging through updating and expanding the “World” pages (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Antarctica and their many children).

Years ago I made an arm-chair Travel Lounge Toy World. It was okay, but it didn’t showcase many immersive experiences.

In fact, there were so many links to fantastic experiences on the pages that I was updating, a single Web World wasn’t going to be enough. There ended up being six Web Worlds (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Antarctica).

Notice that I loved my Enchanted Beach House so much, I repurposed it for all of them. Then, as with the Nature Center, I made a central Web World to access the others. Voila! The result was Wanderlust Travel Villa!

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Walk-in-Web

Earlier in February, after the extravaganza that was Wanderlust, I wasn’t sure that I would be up to making more Web Worlds any time soon. Then I was updating the Arts & Entertainment pages and realized a few things.

First, I don’t spend nearly enough time on them, and I don’t add that content to the other pages as much as I should either. I need to fix that.

Second, my earlier Walk-in-Art Toy World was kind of pathetic, and it didn’t have links to great art museums that you can visit on the Web.

Of course, that just wouldn’t do at all, so welcome to Walk-in-Art & Museums.

Touch the art and doorways to visit 360° experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
One World to Rule Them All

After reading the story above, I hope you can see why I needed to make a single Web World to access the others. It became too unwieldy to find all of the Web Worlds distributed across the Cosma Web site, and old fashioned text links to them would be too boring and not in the spirit of why I made them.

I hope you enjoy using Web Worlds@Cosma to Hike, Wander and Walk-in the hundreds of 3D and 360° experiences that you can find through Cosma Web Worlds Welcome Area!

Enjoy!
— M. E. Hopper

Walk-in-Art & Museums!

~ mehopper

Last week I wrote Enchanted Beach Houses where I explained how I was inspired to create the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa. It’s a “virtual travel” application with a visual interface to over a hundred 3D and 360° experiences.

In case you didn’t see it, here it is again.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

You can use the above interface or these posters to visit all seven “Web Worlds.”

           

One thing that I regretted was that I couldn’t include more 3D and 360° experiences.

There just wasn’t enough room in the Villa to link to the hundreds of experiences that I’ve included on the pages on Cosma.

For example, I had to decide whether to include the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre?

I ultimately decided to leave off the Louvre.

That means that there are links to virtual experiences on the page about France on Cosma that are not in the Europe Room in the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa.

Here are examples of experiences that you will see links to on Cosma that are not in the Villa.

Virtual Tours (Louvre, Official Website)
Louvre Museum (360 Stories)
The Louvre Museum a 360° Experience (Escape Now, YouTube 360° Video)

I found myself leaving out a lot of museum experiences, and I was particularly sad to leave out experiences for some of the greatest art museums. That’s why I decided that this old Toy World Walk-in-Art could use an upgrade.

This is the old world. Click on paintings to see 3D and 360° experiences.


You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Now welcome to Walk-in-Art & Museums!

Touch art and doorways to visit 360° experiences.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Here are links to some other, related posts on Cosma.

Walk-in-Art
Art Revisited
Dive-in-Art
Leonardo Lately
Magical Paintings
Into Van Gogh

Enjoy, but beware, it’s easy to get lost in 360° art!

Find out more about the visual arts and museums …

Enchanted Beach Houses

~ mehopper

I live in the Northeast, and I hate January!

I know it’s “almost” February, but I’m not a huge fan of that either.

This is the view outside my window right now.

There’s more winter left than I can take, no matter what the ground hog says this weekend.

Look at my weekend forecast from yesterday.

What the heck is freezing spray advisory anyway? I had to look it up on Wikipedia.

Freezing Spray Advisory is issued by the National Weather Service to warn sea vessels and sometimes road vehicles near the shoreline that accumulation of freezing water droplets and icing due to a combination of cold suspended droplets, wind, and cold air, so vessel movement is possible, however, accumulations are not expected to reach rates of 2 cm per hour, or else a heavy freezing spray watch, warning or a specific notice would be issued. — Wikipedia

Lovely.

I guess I should be grateful that it’s not a heavy freezing spray warning, right?

Somehow I just can’t muster that gratitude.

Being the beach person that I am, it’s at times like this that I do what I’ve dubbed “beachscrolling” — it’s a bit like doomscrolling, but far less depressing.

For example, my favorite walk between King’s Beach and Nahant Beach looks like this now.

So I go visit various web pages where I’ve posted this 360° image that I took years ago.

When I go to walk at Revere Beach, this is what it looks like at the Wonderland MBTA Station.

Here’s a view from the South end of the beach.

That’s when I get a bit of joy out of re-visiting this 360° image that I took a few summers ago.

Finally, sometimes I get bored with my own still pictures of local beaches. That’s when I start beachscrolling on YouTube looking for other people’s 360° videos of beaches that I loved visiting in the past. This is probably more aptly dubbed “beachstrolling.”

Here’s a 360° video by Ryan Kawailani Ozawa for beachstrolling on Waikiki Beach.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Ryan Kawailani Ozawa (YouTube Channel)

Last week I got a little carried away, though.

I decided it would be more visceral to have a 3D interface for beachstrolling.

Here’s an imaginary hut that I hacked together on Waikiki Beach.

Just click the doorway to take a beachstroll.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

Now that’s a break from winter in New England!

One problem, though.

I love to beachstroll on South Beach, too.

Here’s a 360° video from YouTube for doing that.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

vr360videos (YouTube Channel)

There’s just one door in my tiny beach hut.

What to do?

Make a beach shack with more doors, of course!

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

I was happy with my new digs for a few days.

Then I happened to be updating all of the country pages on Cosma, and I came across a bevy of 360° YouTube videos showing awesome beaches in Australia. Here are a few of them.

Sydney Bondi Beach (SouthernCross VR, YouTube 360° Video)
Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia (Tourism Australia, YouTube 360° Video
Bells Beach Drone Interactive Flight. (Spin 360-3D, YouTube 360° Video)

That beach shack got an(other) upgrade!

Welcome to my Enchanted Beach House!

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

If you get bored with my set list and want to go somewhere else, here is how to do it.

Start by picking a beach. It can be one you’ve been to yourself, or any other one.

You can find plenty of great U.S. beaches on Stephen Leatherman’s Dr. Beach website. If you’re feeling more adventuresome, then you can take your pick from the best beaches in the world using CNN Travel’s Worlds Best Beaches website. They have an Interactive Map to help you find a great beach for “beachstrolling.”

Once you know where you want to go, then go to YouTube and put in the name of the beach followed by “360°.” Voilà, you will probably have plenty of gist for beachstrolling.

So a few things happened during my adventures in beachstrolling this week.

One of those things is that I got inspired to add a new category of links called “Fun in the Sun” to the country pages on Cosma.

In addition, I was listening to the radio and heard these lyrics to the song A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman.

There’s a house we can build
Every room inside is filled
With things from far away
The special things I compile
Each one there to make you smile
On a rainy day
— Benj Pasek and Justin Paul

Now that was food for thought, and look what happened after that …

Welcome to Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa!!!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Happy beachstrolling … and other travels 😉

Find out more about beaches, travel and the World…

Americas Canada, United States, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina
Europe United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece
Africa Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa, Madagascar
Asia India, China, Japan
Oceania Australia, New Zealand
Polar Regions Arctic, Antarctica

Hike the Web

~ mehopper

Sunday, November 17th is National Hiking Day, and it’s one of my favorite “made up” holidays!

Here’s an inspirational video about it that includes a bit of nice history.

On This Day (YouTube Channel)
On This Day (Official Website)

Celebrating is easy — just take a hike, or a walk, if that’s more your speed.

The U.S. National Park Service maintains this handy map to help you find a place near you.

Find a Park Map (U.S. National Park Service)

Now, perhaps you are someone who needs a bit more inspiration than watching a video and clicking a link to find a park, or maybe you’re not in a position to take a hike or walk at all.

In that case, perhaps a “virtual” hike might help you celebrate. There are actually a surprising number of ways to take those on the Web.

For example, the U.S. National Park Service maintains a page for that, too.

Find Your “Virtual” Park (US National Park Service)

In addition, many of the parks’ websites have “Photos and Multimedia” pages that include “virtual” experiences. Here is an example from the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon Virtual Tours (US National Park Service)

There are also many 360° videos on YouTube that provide virtual visits to National Parks.

For example, Air Pano has made quite a few of them. Here are links to pages on their website for three of them. Their home page has a map where you can find more.

Grand Canyon National Park
Yellowstone National Park
Bryce Canyon National Park

Here’s another YouTube Channel with a long playlist of great videos.

National Parks Virtual Tours — 360° Immersive Travel Experiences (Odyssey Visual Media)

Of course, Google doesn’t just make it so that you can immerse yourself in YouTube videos — they are also behind Google Earth. Here’s their “virtual visit” to the Grand Canyon.

Grand Canyon (Google Earth)

There are also some neat custom made “virtual” experiences. Virtual Yosemite is an example. There is also a Virtual Yosemite Directory.

Finally, writing this post inspired me to create this 360° experience called Hiking Trails Hall.

Click the “doors” to enter 360° virtual parks and “i”s for information about them.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

All of this nudged me to update the “nature” pages on Cosma. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, I was inspired to create this entire Nature Center with three other spaces to explore in addition to Hiking Trails Hall. Again, click “doors” to enter 360° experiences, “i”s for information about them, and arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center. Some objects also link to fun 360° experiences.

If you can’t see it, or it isn’t working, you can also see it directly on Kuula.

Enjoy & Happy Hiking!

Learn more about nature …

Beachy Adventures

~ mehopper

Hello, it’s been awhile.

You may have noticed that there haven’t been as many posts on Cosma as there used to be. There are a few reasons for this, but a big one is that, with an old project like Cosma, the focus on different parts of it must shift over time.

Last year’s focus began with cleaning up and expanding the content on the pages. The previous formatting wasn’t great, and there were quite a lot of broken links. They were pretty mangy, and it was time to deal with it.

Then the abrupt discontinuation of the 360° image hosting service called RoundMe required an additional focus on recoding and posting all of the Toy Worlds. You can see all of the re-posted Toy Worlds on Kuula.

Here is the main entry to the new version of Toy Worlds. Click on objects to find out about them. Use the menu or doors to visit other Toy Worlds.

While all of that was going on, the posts (which I call Adventures), a major priority for so long, fell by the wayside. Once upon a time there were over 200 of them that had been accumulating since 2016 when Cosma moved to WordPress after Wikispaces shut down (there were hundreds more posts there that were written over ten years and have never been re-posted here). Many posts on this site were outdated, and a lot of the YouTube videos were broken. I decided that it would be better to hide them until I had time to currate and repost them.

So, the time to focus on posts has arrived. Watch for many old and new “Adventures” to (re)appear in the semi-near-future.

I decided to start with (re)posting some “Beachy Things.” This isn’t because they’re all that central to the content of Cosma. They are not.

It’s just because whenever I start to work on something for Cosma, I tend to start with things that relate to my personal art and adventures, and those tend to be focused on beachy things. I attribute this to the undue influence of my pesky Hopper genes.

It is no coincidence that there are pages about beaches, lighthouses and sandcastles.

One of my first Toy Worlds was also a silly little beach scene. Here it is.

I first introduced that in this post called, not surprisingly, The Beach.

Here are other “beachy” posts that I spiffed up.

Beach Gazes
Gone Beaching!
Catch Some Waves!
Sand Art

I hope you have enjoyed this beachy break. If it has inspired you to visit a beach, either virtually or in real life, then check out CNN’s A Year of the World’s Best Beaches and Dr. Beach to find more sea, sand and sun.

Happy Beaching!

Toy Worlds@Cosma

~ mehopper

I’ve got toys on the brain.

Why not? It ’tis toy season, after all!

Except that if you’ve been reading these posts for awhile, then you know I’ve had toys on the brain for many months now because I’ve been creating experimental interfaces to this site, and I’ve been using toys to do it 🙂

Cosma.org is a directory of some of the best content resources on the web, so showcasing great resources is the primary goal of this project. However another key goal has always been to provide a fun spatial interface to those great resources. There have been many versions of interfaces made in many ways over the years (HyperCard, SecondLife, Unity3D etc.). You can find out more about them on the Worlds page.

A funny thing happened while doing “previs” for a future version, though.

It turned out that using a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera and Kuula to hack together a demo led to an unexpectedly fun and useful interface.

This 360° image is the first in a series of Toy Worlds that serve as a 3D interface to Cosma.

Click on objects to find out about them.
Use the menu or doors to visit other Toy Worlds.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Here is one of the earliest, less “polished” demos that I created before all of the Toy Worlds that are distributed across this site. There are some fun nooks and crannies to explore in this one!

While it is a bit “rough around the edges” relative to the other, later demos, it does have the advantage of having been shot in an actual dollhouse, so it is the most “toy season” appropriate Toy World demo of them all!

Bit of Backstory

I bought a RICOH THETA S 360° awhile ago.

I didn’t want me and/or the house in every shot as I learned to use the camera.

Then I had an idea! Why not use a lamp shade to cover the camera?

I tried that, but the only lamp shades in the house were too little to get a sense of the focal point and resolution in the shots.

There was lamp shade shopping to be done.

That is how I found myself in a Target with a lamp shade on my head checking out the view.


Ooops! 🙂

So, I found the perfect lamp shade and started to learn how to shoot 360° images.
Perfect Lamp Shade

Of course, inside a lamp shade is boring!

That’s why I also grabbed some cheap, silly stuff at Target when I got the lamp shade.

Next I decided to test out the 360° photo sharing service called Kuula.

It has the ability to add links, so I decided to make something more elaborate to test out the linking capabilities.

Here’s the first “shade world” that I created in order to test links in Kuula 🙂

It was around this time that I began to realize that a more elaborate version of this approach might work for doing “previs” for some “microworlds” that I plan to make and embed on this site when there is a sufficiently advanced way to show high quality and interactive 3D spaces on web pages.

I began going in that direction with this “microworld” that was my first experiment in using Kuula as a “previs” tool before creating something in a more robust platform like Unity3D.

Then I found this adorable dollhouse in a local antique shop, and I just had to start making some far more elaborate demos!

In order to get more objects in the dollhouse and provide closure to the space, I built it out with some wooden frames. Then those wooden frames turned out be so useful, they clearly took on a life of their own!

So, things went on from there to become the interface to Cosma that Toy Worlds are now — you will see many Toy Worlds distributed across this site.

At this point I’ve taken these demos to their natural conclusion as far as making interfaces to this site. My next adventure will involve either moving on to a new 3D/360° platform or going back to using Unity 3D for making visual interfaces to this site. You can watch for updates about my progress doing this on the Worlds page of this site.

While I’m not planning on creating any more Toy Worlds for this site, that doesn’t mean that there is no future for them.

I don’t know if you noticed, but Toy Worlds also happen to be a great, newfangled way to do those good old staple projects for elementary school students, dioramas.

I’m hoping that elementary school teachers and anyone who is raising an elementary school kid will not only get a kick out of exploring Toy Worlds@Cosma.org — they might also be inspired to create some of their own!

So there it is — I hope you enjoy Toy Worlds & Happy Holidays!

Find out more about Worlds@Cosma …

The Beach

~ mehopper

One long term goal of Cosma is to include an entertaining, interactive and immersive 3D Interface. There are already “demos” of what that might look like, but none of the available technologies are ideal, so there is no full implementation of the vision (yet).

The most recent demo is a fun little Toy World that started out as an experiment in using a 360° image as a “previs” tool for a full implementation in Unity3D.

Click on objects to find out about them.

You can also explore this Toy World on Kuula.

Stay tuned for more fun experiments soon!

Find out more on the Worlds and Worlds Challenge pages …

See also Beach, Lighthouse and Sandcastle

Around the World In …

~ mehopper

Once upon a time, back in the Victorian era a hundred years ago when Jules Verne was writing Around the World in Eighty Days, it took a little while to even vicariously circumnavigate the world by reading about it.

These days, thanks to professional video productions from groups like Travel Channel and Lonely Planet, you can feel like you’ve seen the world in far less time than it takes to read a book about it, and you can see it in considerably more vivid detail.

But now, thanks to the wonders of compilation, time-lapse and 360° video, you can make the journey even faster and with a far greater field of view than ever before. Here are links to three excellent examples from YouTube that together, appropriately enough, take eight minutes.

Daybreak Around the World (The New York Times)
The Best 360° Aerial Footage by AirPano (AirPano, YouTube)
Explore the World with IM360 (Ryan Whitehead, YouTube)

So, there it is — “Around the World in 8 Minutes,” and in 360° no less!

Of course, that just scratches the surface of how great 360° videos and other types of “3D virtual experiences” can take you to exotic places all around the world.

Check out Cosma’s newest Web World called Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa that is designed for exploring the World through 360° experiences!

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Also, check out these recently updated pages on this site to see more fine-grained experience, but beware, there are enough experiences in the Wanderlust Magic Travel Villa and on these pages to take you around the world in about 800 hours!

Find out more about the World and how to travel around it…

Americas Canada, United States, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina
Europe United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece
Africa Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa, Madagascar
Asia India, China, Japan
Oceania Australia, New Zealand
Polar Regions Arctic, Antarctica