GopherVR is an enhanced Internet Gopher client that includes a 3D visualization tool for viewing resource collections as 3D scenes. It explored how people outside of formal research laboratories could use spatial metaphors to access information. The 3D view was intended to be similar to 3D games of the time, like ''

Spectre Spectre, specter or the spectre may refer to: Religion and spirituality * Vision (spirituality) * Apparitional experience * Ghost Arts and entertainment Film and television * ''Spectre'' (1977 film), a made-for-television film produced and writt ...

''. The authors were interested in how this spatial representation could address the "lost in hyperspace" feeling that people using conventional Gopher clients sometimes experienced. In 1995, the

Gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They ar ...

developers at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

released GopherVR. Using Gopher+ protocol extensions, spatial positions for Gopher resources are specified, and GopherVR clients combine traditional Gopher hierarchy browsing with 3D scene navigation. It was primarily written by Mark P. McCahill, Paul Lindner and Neophytos Iacovou. This original version was available for

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

, using Motif and

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

, and the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

; although incomplete, they were offered as partially functional

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versions for testing. Godot was another GopherVR client. It used a

Z39.50 Z39.50 is an international standard client–server, application layer communications protocol for searching and retrieving information from a database over a TCP/IP computer network, developed and maintained by the Library of Congress. It is cov ...

interface to libraries, allowing you to navigate the contents of a library in 3D. According to McCahill, GopherVR's goals included showing the potential of structures that "separate the organization from the content", so "you could display the organizational structure a bunch of different ways", which the Web did not have ways of handling at the time. At the time GopherVR became available, the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

had recently been growing, and Gopher was already less commonly used.

Revival

The software packages for GopherVR were stored on the UMN Boombox

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

server, and (probably due to a defective backup and restore) virtually all Gopher software on this server over 96k in length had become corrupted, resulting in the loss of all publicly available copies of the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

until it was rediscovered and made available by Mark McCahill in June 2008. In December 2009, GopherVR was re-released by Cameron Kaiser in an updated form for

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and other platforms, but is still considered incomplete.

References

External links

* opher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/gophervr Floodgap GopherVR project gopherspaceincludes source code and Mac OS X binaries
Paper - A Preliminary Design for a 3-D Spatial User Interface for Internet Gopher

GopherVR in Launchpad

Paper - Customizing Unix Servers For 3D

TurboGopherVR Client for Mac at Sunet

GopherVR Client for Irix at Sunet
* Godot http://www.botik.ru/~znamensk/CTAN/tools/gopher/Unix/Godot/GODOT%20v0.1 Gopher (protocol) {{network-software-stub