GopherVR is an enhanced

Internet Gopher The Gopher protocol () is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to ...

client that includes a 3D

visualization Visualization or visualisation may refer to: * Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message * Data visualization, the graphic representation of data * Information visuali ...

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 wri ...

''. 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 developers at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

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 Mark Perry McCahill (born February 7, 1956) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He has developed and popularized a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s, including the Gopher protocol, Uniform Resource Locators ( ...

, Paul Lindner and Neophytos Iacovou. This original version was available for

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser 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, ...

, 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 provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

, and the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. ...

; although incomplete, they were offered as partially functional alpha versions for testing. Godot was another GopherVR client. It used a Z39.50 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 had recently been growing, and Gopher was already less commonly used.

Revival

The software packages for GopherVR were stored on the UMN Boombox FTP 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 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 operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

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