2LIPGarden: 3D Hypermedia for Everyone

The early Web was hailed for being easy to use, and what is more important, giving people a chance to participate in its growth. The Web3D was believed to have potential to be the next step in the Web’s evolution, since it could benefit from graphics hardware and provide users with new and exciting experiences. Nevertheless, Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), the first Web3D standard, and its successor X3D, did not generate commercial success. These languages were excessively complex for average Internet users. In this paper, we propose 2LIPGarden, a 3D Hypermedia publishing framework that lets individuals who only know basic HTML – those same enthusiasts who could write pages for the early Web – create simple, easy to use yet interactive 3D web pages. Our framework builds upon 2-Layer Interface Paradigm (2LIP), an attempt to marry advantages of 3D experience with the advantages of narrative structure of hypertext. We introduce c-link to HTML, a new type of hyperlink, which connects text with its 3D visualization