Floating in the Worldstream (AKA 3-D Browsing)
Ah, the web. Despite being a non-physical place with no concrete layout besides what we apply to it, we still refer to Internet happenings spatially—i.e., “it’s on the top right.” But as we continue to move more and more into using the web more like a diary organized by time, the “web” metaphor, which invokes visions of hyperlinks slapdashed together to form an archaic, inefficient network of information, seems unlikely to make it into the next decade. We simply aren’t using the Internet in the same way as 10 years ago.
Which is why Wired contributors David Gelernter and Erik Freeman developed the concept of the “worldstream.” Instead of using links to form a web, the worldstream uses “narrative streams” (made up of social media, blogs, and so on) to follow the temporal nature of the Internet. The result is a drastically different representation of being online, with info flowing to you from the future and away into the past in an organized cluster. That necessarily means the invention of a virtual 3-D display (think Hackers) that allows us to literally surf through the worldstream and extract pertinent info.
And that actually already exists in the form of lifestreams.com, a software prototype that puts an esthetic on Freeman and Gelerntner’s vision. While not the enveloping online experience that this will come to be, lifestreams.com does show what we can do with our current limited technology. A few more years, and we’ll be surfing the web literally.
Read more at http://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/04/12/future-communication-telepathy-holograms-new-internet/#wqzDFdhZvQl0Y9bv.99