see and grasp the nature of the organizational world
that surrounds you.”
Cyber-Commons instantiates Mirror Worlds as the
telescope one uses to view and collect data from
global resources but goes further, bringing people
together, possibly in real time, to enable collaboration. The goal is not just to mirror the “universe in a
shoebox” [ 3] but to enable people worldwide to work
together to create and learn from the world-in-a-box.
Mirror Worlds went beyond the notion of virtual
worlds, foreseeing the existence of advanced optical
networks that allow us to share real spaces and real
data. While virtual worlds, like Second Life, are useful within the context of cyberinfrastructure when
avatar-based systems are needed to explore simulated
worlds, Mirror Worlds described a much more substantial environment.
In 1992, our laboratory, under the direction of
Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin, developed the CAVE
virtual-reality theater [ 2]. Also in 1992, we networked
the CAVE to supercomputers. By 1995, the CAVE
was networked to people at more than a dozen sites
[ 4]. As pointed out in [ 1], “Today’s virtual worlds
contrast sharply with the concept of total immersive
VR that has long been popular with science fiction
writers but has proven so difficult for computer scientists to achieve in the real world. Second Life and
World of Warcraft images are restricted to the screen
of an ordinary computer monitor, rather than filling
the walls of a VR cave or binocular head-mounted
display. On the one hand, this may suggest that people really do not need visually perfect VR. On the
other hand, today’s virtual worlds may be preparing
millions of people to demand full VR in the future.”
The future of real-time scientific research and collaboration is indeed in immersive environments. The
requirements for a comprehensive global cyberinfrastructure are becoming more and more demanding as
scientific research becomes more complex and as scientists need better collaboration and visualization
technologies combined with the same digital conveniences they have at home. What domain scientists
want is to interface with colleagues and data and easily mashup very large data sets in order to study and
understand complex systems, from the micro to the
macro scale, in space and time. To enable these cyber-mashups, the future Cyber-Commons must seamlessly integrate ultra-high-resolution 2D and
