VIRTUAL CITY II/V
(Abstract of the 1997 Project)
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THE ORGANIZATION
 The Concept
Any information stream has to be organized by an underlying well-thought structure to provide best results for perception. This depends on interactivity, adoption possibilities and navigation alternatives.
The Social Web Terminal
The free access to this system can, based on the equality of all members of the community, be guaranteed by installing of some small, connected entrance gates or terminals. These public stations or web cams provide the full content of the rural database and offer access and connection and much more. Not only affirmed institutions can be reached, but also advanced information can be distributed. This expands the terminals to a social, cultural, weather or traffic web cam, public telephone, communicator or even virtual home base.
The Virtual/Augmented Reality
Existing virtual worlds allow participants also to use and to navigate nearby in their natural or usual environment, without difficulties in the orientation or determination process. They can reproduce models, dynamic instruments and databases, VRML 2.0 worlds and virtual cities, 3D corporate Marketing Sites, Animated Bots, Avatars and mascot characters, Online Games and can be animated and (live) performed as an image of (existing) landscapes and galleries.
As part in the whole information structure with different levels these worlds can be constructed in modules, instant used and therefore senseful adopted in complexity, detail, structure, distance and resolution. This offers also a return of investment strategy of the growing database by different users, projects and purposes.
VIRTUAL CITY
A virtual city, as an image of our environment allows us to take advantage of the improvements of the communication technology for our every days live. It is not necessary anymore to dive into the deep and abstract structures and cryptic labyrinths of operating systems. We are now able to stay also virtually at home and to take our personal experience and orientation system with us. This can support a widespread use of these technologies and improve the national knowledge base and market.
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(Some previews of the market and the City Hall in Halle/Saale - early stages of the Marktplatz 2000 project of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Jonas 
/prototype of the VRML World.)
As every virtual world, also this project is not real or material and therefore additional and new filters and tools to interact and navigate are needed. They allow us to use and simulate the demanded functions of the non virtual environment as the main attribute of our models.
In some special cases they can also expand or replace the old fashioned structures, as demonstrated in Multi User Dungeons (MUD) with interacting persons - the so called Avatars.
This brings us to a remarkable fact of the virtuality - we are now allowed to cross over the given boundaries of nature - if we wish to do so. At one side we can prefer it to stay and live very anonym or inpersonal as in the dungeons, especially in gender, on the other hand we can also simulate or preview impossible or unimaginable things in reality.
For instance weather and traffic forecasts as well as time tables or position finder or especially for the City of Halle, floods in its worse results can easily be demonstrated as warning and information much earlier, based on the same topographic and fundamental data of a three dimensional world. But it is still problematic to create a suitable solution in structure, detail, resolution for these needs.
To handle this amount of data intelligent filter and presentation algorithms are still needed, because of the lack of computing power in the contemporary consumer products. Therefore it seems advisable to construct intelligent structures, create modular and adaptive structures and to reduce complexity to the level of the presentation necessary for the project. This should reflect also the present and future connectivity rates, because there is also a hard influence to the participants monetary. By the way, that means not that the level of intelligence, interactivity or detail in construction mode should be decreased, but there will be a difference between construction/demonstration and the present solution, this will keep the possibility to keep an eye on and to adopt further improvements in this technology. (This topic is discussed later in the Filter Algorithms and Audio/Surround chapters.)
Nevertheless allow us the new fascinating technologies to attract many new visitors and users. In addition there is nothing to say against, if child's are running, playing and dooming trough our virtuality, learn something during this process and take it back into reality.
(Technological examples from the net can bee seen especially at SGI's VRML home page http://vrml.sgi.com/ and at Planet9 http://www.planet9.com/ , other examples are noted in the chapter VRML Gallery. The demonstrations of the City of Toronto and San Francisco are especially advisable, because these examples present many features on a lower level, for instance walking and linking, we also want to introduce.)
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