WorldBoard
 
What Comes After the WWW? 
Jim Spohrer
Learning Communities Group, ATG
(c)Apple Computer, Inc.

Abstract:

While on sabbatical during the summer of 1996, I was hiking near Mt. Shasta in northern California, and pondering the question: What comes after the WWW? However, I was soon distracted by a beautiful plant beside the trail, and wanted to know what it was. I imagined being able to use my PowerBook with Ricochet modem to search the WWW and find a similar picture. If I could find such a picture, then I would know what the plant was. However, the next person who came along and wondered what the plant was would be in exactly the same position as me. I took a digital picture of the plant, so I could later ask someone what kind of plant it was. A few people in my group at Apple had been playing with GPS systems, and it occurred to me they had been talking about using a camera in conjunction with a GPS to geocode or "place stamp" pictures. I pushed my glasses back up my nose, and imagined putting it all together, including a new viewing system built into my glasses, and a way to leave information at that spot for the next hiker who asked the question I had asked. Eventually, I came to call this notion WorldBoard.

WorldBoard is just one possible answer to the question of what comes after the WWW. I'm sure there are many more possible answers. For my part, I'm especially interested in this question, because the WWW is a great technology platform for supporting learning, but of course it's not the end of the line. Learning platforms evolve over time: books, TV, computer, standalone computer, networked computer, mobile computer, etc. Try your hand at creating a solution to the following imagination challenge:

Imagination Challenge: What Comes After the WWW?

Design a new SPECIES (SPECIES is a Planet Earth Communication and Information Enhancement System) such as the telephone system or the WWW. Leverage both of these previous SPECIES as much as possible in your solution. The first version should be easy to assemble from off-the-shelf components at Fry's Electronics.

WorldBoard: A Proposed Solution

WorldBoard is a proposed planetary augmented reality system that facilitates innovative ways of associating information with places. Short-term the goal is to allow users to post messages on any of the six faces of every cubic meter (a hundred billion billion cubic meters) of space humans might go on this planet (see personal web pages when you look at someone's office door; label interesting plants and rocks on nature trails). Long-term WorldBoard allows users to experience any information in any place, co-registered with reality.

WorldBoard could be developed in four steps: (1) WorldBoard servers associate information (a personal, password protected Web page) with any plane at any location around the planet, (2) WorldBoard clients with "plus or minus one meter location sense" allow Web pages from the WorldBoard server to be browsed and authored, (3) WorldBoard glasses with "context sense" and head & eye tracking capabilities allow information to appear fixed and co-registered with reality, and (4) WorldBoard services archive information and design information spaces both indoors (offices, homes) and outdoors (national parks, tourist sites).

  1. The Idea: Putting Information In Its Place
  2. The Problem: Associating Information with Places
  3. A Key Subproblem: Determining Location
  4. Advantages of Bits in Places
  5. Importance of the SPECIES
  6. Approach: How to Build WorldBoard
  7. Related Work
  8. Existing Services and Products
  9. Future Scenarios
  10. Concluding Remarks
  11. References
  12. Acknowledgements

This paper was retrieved with permission of the author from  http://trp.research.apple.com/events/ISITalk062097/Parts/WorldBoard/default.html on June 16, 1998.