________  ________  ________   
   2022-01-17                                   /        \/        \/    /   \  
                                               /       __/         /_       _/ 
   Be  warned,  dear reader,  that this is a  /        _/         /         / 
half baked idea I  just want to get out into  \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
the ether  so I don't forget about it.  I've    /        \/        \/    /   \
been turning  it over in my head  off and on   /        _/         /_       _/
for a while  but recently  epoch  shared his  /-        /        _/         /
monolithic  todo list[1]  and it had an item  \________/\________/\___/____/
on it  that  said  simply  "gemini vr"  so I
thought now would be a good time to get some thoughts down on paper.

   I'm heavily invested in VR,  I'll admit it.  At first  it seemed  hokey and
then it was fun but still  mostly a novelty,  now it's really gotten its hooks
into me.  I spend a  lot of time in VR just to be in VR,  not  really there to
play a game or to socialize, just to be in the space. I love it in there and I
find real comfort in it.

   Naturally,  and if you're the  type  to be  reading  this I'm  sure  you'll
immediately  understand  the feeling,  my love for the space makes  me want to
produce  content for it,  just like with Gopher and Gemini  and the tildeverse
and all those good places but I'm very, very green when it comes to 3D. I find
working in 3D really alien and between that and just not having enough time to
dedicate to sitting still and studying, the whole thing seemed so overwhelming
that I'd either never start anything or quickly get frustrated and lose
interest when I did.

   It got me  wondering,  where is that lofi sweet  spot  in VR?  What's  VR's
Gopher and Gemini analog?  And I couldn't find it, so maybe I have to make it?
I don't know. It seems like a huge undertaking.  But every journey starts with
a single  step and so I sow these seeds of an idea  in the  loamy  underground
Internet in the hopes I can eventually cultivate a habitable garden.

   Broadly, I imagine bVR as a protocol and markup language for VR. To VR what
Gemini is to the Web. Imagine this:

   Gemini's gemtext describes  a way to format a page of text and hyperlink to
other pages,  think of a Gemini  page as a two  dimensional object.  I want to
extrapolate that into three dimensional space and it's easy right? The surface
of a three dimensional  object is made up of two dimensional  faces so we make
up the surface of our three dimensional VR space with two dimensional Gem/Goph
items.

   I envision it something  like this,  for ease of reading I'll represent the
markup  as a kind of JSON but really  this is up to discussion  and ideally it
would be something simpler, it's just an existing syntax I can leverage now to
better communicate the idea


     { defines a solid
          { defines a surface
               "contains an item description",
               is the item
          }
     }


   That's really it, everything  else is handled by the client which can be as
fancy or as simple  as you like,  the markup describes  the solids  you see in
your space  and what data  (text, an image, a video,  an audio file, a link to
another directory) you receive when you press on the surface of the solid. the
number of items in the solid defines the shape, a solid with two items appears
as a card,  a solid with four items appears  as a tetrahedron, etc.  Any solid
with a number  of sides that cannot be rendered (eg. 1, 3)  gets rounded up to
the  nearest  solid;  1 becomes a card,  3 becomes a tetrahedron,  each with a
blank space added to fill in the gap.

   Your client  (the beVR browser) consumes  the markup file and renders  a 3D
space populated  with these solids,  you pick them up,  turn them over in your
hand to browse the content, poke the surface of the solid to open the content.
Nothing much more complicated than that. Lofi VR.


[1] https://thebackupbox.net/todo/epoch.txt



EOF