Contextual Architecture of Cyberspace

In his essay "On Engineering the Appearance of Cyberspace," http://www.wizardnet.com/musgrave/cyberspace.html Ken Musgrave points out that early work in VR reveals people have difficulty navigating in abstract visual environments.

Our visual image processing system evolved to help us estimate relative positions and orientations in surroundings rich in natural fractals, so the minimalist, spare Euclidean geometry of many virtual environments lacks the rich visual cues of nature.

Musgrave suggests building a cyberspace with a fractal context for ease and familiarity of navigation.

Fractals are well-suited for all this purpose, because they generate convincing forgeries of nature and do so with very compact data sets.

Consequently, only a small bandwidth overhead is needed to produce digital environment much easier to navigte.

A metaphoric application of fractals to cyberspace comes from the non-physical nature of cyberspace.

In physical space, real estate is limited: people come in a small range of sizes, so factories, offices, and stores cannot be built just anywhere.

There is room for only so many coffee shops near a good bookstore.

These problems do not arise in cyberspace: we can always zoom in and add more detail at any level we want.

Whereas zooming in on the side of a physical bookstore reveals individual bricks, then the texture of the bricks, and so on, zooming in on the side of a virtual bookstore can reveal a hierarchy of other stores and links, to as many levels as we wish.

Similarly, moving a physical office from New York to Los Angeles requires a substantial outlay of relocation costs, but visitors to a virtual office never need know the server has moved.

There is little difference between linking to a website in Australia and one in Maine.

In a sense, the web has already hinted at similarities between cyberspace and Borges' story The Aleph.

The next few years should be very exciting.

Fractal geometry offers many opportunities to the designers of cyberspace. Richard Powers' novel Plowing the Dark gives an interesting view into some of these directions.

However, the most far-reaching applications are likely in areas we do not yet expect.