Cosma / Communication / Knowledge / Navigation / Worlds / Challenge
A key goal of Cosma is to provide a 3D interface to enable truly spatial Knowledge Navigation of the Knowledge Resources hosted on the Cosma Web site. Dr. M.E. Hopper has experimented with creating many different 2D visual and 3D spatial interfaces to internet resources with a wide variety of software platforms since the 1980s. She first conceptualized making these types of interfaces while playing with a “Star Trek” like game on PLATO in the mid-1970s. The first generation of functional experiments were created with Apple’s HyperCard that ran in color on an Apple IIGS with ProDOS. Since that time experimental interfaces have been created with most of the “hypermedia” software that could support making such interfaces.1
This is a timeline of the evolution of Cosma interfaces.
PLATO (1976-1980)
HyperCard (1987 – 1994)
Director (1988 – 1990)
PowerPoint (1990 – 1991)
HyperStudio (1991 – 2005)
MicroWorlds (1994 – 2005)
AthenaMuse 2 (1995 – 1996)
SecondLife (2006 – Present)
Unity 3D (2015 – 2017)
RoundMe (2017 – 2022)
Kuula (2022 – Present)
It’s been quite a journey, and the saga is still continuing today because the truth is that there is no ideal software platform available to the general public at the present time. Below is a history of past interfaces, current work and pointers to future directions.
Knowledge Places2
Knowledge Navigation & Exploration Centers
Second Life (2006-Present)
The Knowledge Places (K-Places) project used the virtual world named Second Life and was the longest running and most extensive experiment thus far. Initial development of K-Places began in 2006, and at the height of the project in 2010, there were many highly visible sites that covered more than a million square meters of land in Second Life.
The virtual sites were made up of thematically organized “spaces” within “places” that used a variety of metaphors (Port, Park, Plaza, Pier, Palace and Paradise). The most important content of the sites was a cadre of 3D links dubbed Knowledge Objects (K-Objects), and they enabled truly spatial Knowledge Navigation. Magic Windows were 3D hyperlinks to Cosma, and Magic Doors were 3D hyperlinks to other locations in Second Life. There was also a cast of other K-Objects that served as “typed” hyperlinks to access other valuable Web sites besides Cosma. You can find out more about them on the K-Objects page.
Hundreds of content specific versions of each of the K-Objects were generated, and then they were distributed throughout the multitude of content specific “spaces” in the K-Places sites. This enabled a thematic approach for exploring Cosma, other Web sites and Second Life.
The K-Places sites continued to be expanded and maintained until 2014. At the height of development in 2010, wandering the grounds of the sites would take visitors to over a thousand interesting things to see and do.
Dr. Hopper also presented about K-Places at a number of professional events that were attended by thousands of people — some of the attendees of those events were also likely visitors to the sites in Second Life.3
Here are links to K-Places and the three main versions.
Knowledge Places (K-Places)
Knowledge Gates to Second Life (K-Gates, Alpha)
Knowledge Palace (K-Palace, Beta)
Knowledge Paradise (K-Paradise, K-Places 1.0)
Unfortunately, it become clear that Second Life was never going to be the best platform to serve as an interface to Cosma. It was too expensive, required powerful computers, plugins and downloads, forced anonymity, had rampant X-rated content and limited access to large numbers of simultaneous users where just a few of the issues among many. Therefore K-Palace, K-Paradise and most of the K-Gates sites were discontinued by late 2014. Then their contents were consolidated into extremely scaled back “archival” sites that hold just a small sample of the spaces and objects that made up the K-Places sites between 2006 and 2014.
The largest archival site is K-Park — it preserves the spaces and objects that were an interface to the Knowledge Realms on the Cosma Web site.
There is also a “sky-space” situated above the ground-level sites — it preserves the spaces and objects that were an interface to the Knowledge Forms on the Cosma Web site.
Click this image to explore it.
Here is a video of an extended walk-through of the K-Places archival sites.
This map shows where the archival sites are in Linden Village. If you have a Second Life account and the software is installed on your computer, then you can click the map to teleport there.
Cosma Welcome Area
Knowledge Navigation & Exploration Center
Second Life & Kuula
There have been numerous promising platforms that have come and gone over the years (e.g. Mozilla Hubs & Spoke), but none have been clear cut choices for a platform to serve as a 3D interface to Cosma. One method that is being used to try out and compare platforms as they come along is the creation of “parallel places” with a small set of similar content and objects.
Second Life is still being used as a baseline for comparison between platforms. The chosen set of content and objects are framed within a Welcome Center for Cosma. There are five rooms with numerous Magic Posters and Magic Objects that link to Cosma and other Web content. Again, these are simplified siblings of the more extensive K-Objects used in K-Places.
This is a picture of the Welcome Area. If you have a Second Life account and software installed, then you can click the image to explore the Welcome Area and the four other rooms (Solar Extremes, Gaia’s Greenhouse, World Travel Lounge and Walk-in-Art).
Toy Worlds are also being used as a baseline for comparing platforms. They are literally “Toy Worlds” because they are dioramas created with dollhouse furniture and other miniatures that are photographed with a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera. The resulting photos are posted on the Kuula 360° photo sharing service in order to overlay links.
They are also figuratively “Toy Worlds” in that they are really just intended to be entertaining placeholders for the more sophisticated Worlds that will hopefully be created with more advanced software in the future.
You can find out more about them on the Toy Worlds page.
Here is a “Toy World” version of the Welcome Area that is parallel to the one in Second Life.
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.
Again, note that Toy Worlds have Magic Posters and Magic Objects that link to Cosma and other Web content. Again, these are siblings of the K-Objects used in K-Places.
Cosma Welcome Area
Knowledge Navigation & Exploration Center
Unity 3D (2015)
Once it was obvious that Second Life was not going to be the platform that would be serving as a 3D interface to Cosma, the search was on for a new platform. That led to an experiment with using Unity to create a “Welcome Center” for Cosma. The demo is not available to download, but here is a video of what it looked like and how it functioned. Notice that the application uses Magic Posters and Magic Objects to serve as 3D links to Cosma and other Web content. They are the simplified siblings of the more extensive K-Objects used in K-Places.
Unfortunately, while the experiment was “somewhat” promising, the ongoing limited and shifting nature of Web publishing options and some other factors led to the decision to shelve the idea of investing time and resources into creating a 3D interface with Unity. It hasn’t been completely ruled out, but “wait and see” remains the best description of the status right now.
Cosma Web Worlds
Knowledge Navigation & Exploration Centers for the Immersive Web
SecondLife & Kuula (2022-Present)
Cosma began featuring Web Worlds with “visual links” to 3D and 360° experiences on other sites starting in 2022.
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 Cosma. Unfortunately, links to amazing experiences blend in with more mundane links (Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Open Courseware, JSTOR etc.).
Web Worlds are designed to bring attention to the best immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web for a specific subject. They are made by creating spaces in SecondLife, taking 360° photos of those spaces and uploading them to Kuula to overlay links to “some” Cosma pages and many great 360° and 3D immersive experiences elsewhere on the Web.
There are many Web Worlds distributed across the pages on Cosma, and some of them are “parallel places” to earlier sites in SecondLife and Toy Worlds.
For example, here is Cosma’s newest Welcome Area!
It is a “parallel place” to the Welcome Areas in SecondLife, Unity and Toy Worlds.
Touch posters and objects to find out about them or visit other worlds.
You can also explore it on Kuula.
If you click on the (not very well hidden) trap door, you will find yourself in this Web World that is an exhibit about Cosma’s history.
You can also explore it on Kuula.
You can learn more about these Web Worlds in the post Cosma’s New Knowledge Lobby!
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 sample 3D and 360° experiences, and click doorways to go to other Web Worlds.
You can also see it directly on Kuula.
Find out more about Web Worlds in the post Hike, Wander & Walk-in the Web!
Web Worlds are similar to the earlier SecondLife sites, Unity 3D experiment and Toy Worlds. The main difference is that they are more focused on linking to immersive 3D and 360° resources rather than just pages on Cosma.
Future Worlds
What happens next?
Time will tell …
The degree to which “Knowledge Worlds” in Second Life, Unity 3D and Kuula differ is the point of the “parallel places” experiments. However, the specific conclusions drawn from the exercise are a topic for another time and place. The most important point is that there is currently no ideal platform for creating a 3D interface with the full power and breadth of the long term vision for Cosma.
The search is still on for a platform available to the general public that can support sufficiently high resolution, complex and interactive 3D/360° worlds that can be embedded on a Web page and viewed with standard browsers without requiring downloads, plugins, logins or unacceptably long load times.
The process of finding that platform is actually going to start with an even smaller set of content from Hopper’s personal Web site first and her New Media Museum Web site second. The results of those experiments will be posted there.
So, keep an eye on M. E. Hopper’s Worlds Challenge page and her New Media Museum’s Virtual Museum page for updates on the progress with the ongoing experiments.
A new 3D interface to Cosma will only appear after the question of platform is resolved.
In the meantime, Toy Worlds and Web Worlds will serve as 3D interfaces to Cosma.
You can also explore Worlds Wall: A Guide to M.E.Hopper’s Pantheon of Worlds!
Touch the pictures to explore the worlds, and this is best done full screen!
You can also see it directly on Kuula …
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1. Hopper worked on a number of academic projects that used Logo and HyperCard during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and she also co-published about some of her work on those projects.
Hopper, M. E. and Lawler, R. W. (1991, August). Pre-Readers’ Word Worlds: Results of Experiences with Young Children and New Directions [Poster]. Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Evanston, IL.
Hopper, M. E., LeBold, W. K., Feghali, A. A. (1991). A Hypermedia-based Problem Solving Approach to Engineering, Learning, Working, and Playing. Frontiers in Education Conference Proceedings, 73-78.
2. Knowledge Places and Knowledge Objects were developed by Dr. M. E. Hopper while she was President of Knowledge Foundry, a small company that developed traditional Web, social media, 3D, eBook and mobile sites. Remnants of the original website are still online.
3. Some of the content on this page was originally developed for two presentations at MIT.
The first presentation in April 2007 was attended by Cory Ondrejka (SL Alt. Cory Linden, Chief Technology Officer@Second Life/Linden Lab) and John Lester (SL Alt. Pathfinder Linden, Second Life Lead Evangelist, Market Development, Boston Operations Director, Market Development in Education@Second Life/Linden Lab).
Hopper, M. E. (2007, April). The Knowledge Gates to SecondLife. Media in Transition 5 Conference: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Hopper, M. E. (2009, April). Cosma: Constructing a Kingdom of Knowledge. Media in Transition 6 Conference: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.