Rhythmeering

The following originally appeared in Jazz and The Future of Global E-Commmerce, a paper I published in 2002.

Location, Location, Location. Without a lot of fanfare, this tried and true principle of business has been making a big comeback. During the dot-com era, the mantra “there’s no there there” was intoned continuously as revenue models were focused on eyeballs. However, there was always a “there” in cyberspace. Physical location of servers quickly became very important to high traffic content site owners and carriers. As e-commerce ramped up, security concerns required that machines be reliably identified. In order to guarantee a given level of service quality, location and related transport costs are important. Agents also need to be able to carry out local transactions in order to minimize costs. Therefore, XOBI agent exchanges are located where the greatest intelligence and economic value lies – at the edges of the network:

• the routers, switches, servers
• the places where people gather and interact online – workgroups, communities

  portals

• the places where computers and consumer devices with broadband, static IP connections exist
• mobile devices

Given the high level of human spatial intelligence and the inherent constraint on display real estate, location-based user interfaces have significant advantages. Location-based metaphor’s are not new, they just haven’t evolved very much since the researchers at Xerox PARC conceived of the office metaphor realized largely via a desktop in the 1970’s. In fact, after adopting the office metaphor with its Lisa computer, Apple Computer threw out the office metaphor with the Macintosh. Microsoft followed suit with Windows, thus taking a giant step backwards.

Xerox’s office vision was conceived of within the context of a network of machines dispersed throughout an enterprise. Early GUI implementations were on Macintosh and Windows personal computers not connected to a network. Window’s Network Neighborhood and Explorer along with web browsers like Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer are all surface-level usages of location metaphors, but without any underlying support.

A number of 3D interfaces for the internet have been attempted and failed due to poor performance, lack of functionality and/or integration. However, during the 90’s several trends began to encourage the use of location-based metaphors. The business case for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) was clear:

Geography matters in almost every sphere of business — maintenance, sales, facilities, marketing, distribution, personnel, regulation, inventory. What could be more obvious than using computers to manage and extend these attributes? Given the ubiquity of geography, GIS would bring new powers and efficiencies to every corner of the enterprise.

CIO Magazine

As costs have plummeted, more and more applications are incorporating GIS features. Similarly for GPS (Global Positioning Systems, which pinpoint physical locations in geograpic space). Video gaming is also moving the industry towards location-based interfaces. PriceWaterhouseCoopers believes virtual environments are the future of the entertainment industry. Extending below the desktop to the router and above the desktop to consumer appliances and mobile devices, the meshverse paradigm takes the next evolutionary step in operating environments. A meshverse provides a location-based, flexible metaphor and architecture that:

• is comprehensible to all types of computer users, not just programmers who devise arcane computer languages
• is able to support multiple interfaces – text, maps, 2D, projected 3D, full 3D

  needed to facilitate speculative investment in the development of virtual locations.

• contains an integrated, location-based development methodology which deals with Participants engaged in exchange Activities as part of business Scenarios on the stage of the worldwide network.