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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 …

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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.

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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.

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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