A broad array of organizations and ideas forms the historical context of Vizbang; communities (various technology communities like SGML, XML, VRML, academic hypertext reasearch, San Francisco, burning man etc., graphics, artistic), print articles, a few books, web articles, software projects, and companies have all played a part in my thinking and presumably where the ideas have originated. The interplay of communities and social contexts alone is complex. Below is a brief and partially annotated bibliography of a few relevant websites, standards, companies and projects.

Note: this page was only actively maintained through January 2001.

Press

November 1999: Tomorrow's Desktop (from Feed - my quote is about halfway down)

Standards

• VRML/X3D
• XML
• XLink
• WebML - new one from xerox.

Organizations

• E-tailing and CAD/CAE Visualization
  • Metacreations
  • NxView
  • RealityWave
  
  
• Associative and Top-Down Interfaces
  • vizible
  • CAIDA - Walrus project
  • Thinkmap
  • Invisible Worlds
  • The Brain
  • Inxight's Site Lens
  • UCB GUIR's DENIM
  • Navihedra
  • NV3D
  • Map.net - from Antarctic.ca
  • PARC UIR group
  
  
• Games and Representational Interfaces
  • Microsoft UI Research
  • Adobe Atmosphre
  • Flatland
  • UBUBU
  • Activeworlds
  • Clockwise3D
  • MyRoom.com - (?)
  • 2Ce
  • Jester Digital
  • ViOS
  • 3Dgroove
  
  
• Other Related Projects and Companies
  • uma - formerly virtual real-estate
  • Muse - AVS - OpenViz
  • EAI/Sense8's WorldToolkit
  • An Atlas of Cyberspaces
  • Trellix
  • The Foresight Institute
  • The Web3d Consortium
  • The Berlin Consortium
  • National Tele-Immersion Initiative

Historical

Remembering the Memex
From Feed, a dialogue regarding an essay written in 1945 by Vannevar Bush describing an imaginary device he calls the Memex. Many of the features he describes are implemented by the current web, and many of the features he describes that aren't implemented by the web could be implemented with a possible future Vizbang interface.

The Curse of Xanadu (from Wired)
Miracle Device (also from Feed)
He may be crazy, but he did basically invent hypertext. Vizbang is in the same application space as Xanadu was, or is. See the Feed document's section on Linktypes, particularly.

The Network of Knowledge (from Engines of Creation)
Tucked away near the back of Eric Drexler's seminal work on nanotechnology is a chapter on advanced hypertext systems. Written in 1986, this is yet another essay that looks past even the web as it exists today. The Foresight Institute's web enhancement project implements some of these features already; Vizbang is a small step towards a more advanced interface for those features.