[vos-d] parameterized views

[Peter Amstutz]

I've been thinking about the time issue a bit more, and it occurred to 
me that while time has its own quirks, the more general issue I'm trying 
to address in VOS is that of parameterized views.

What I mean is, a vobject represents some logical entity.  However, how 
that entity is presented/viewed may depend on various factors -- the 
preferences and permissions of the user, the time, and also transient 
paramters like a search query.

To add another motivation example, consider hypervos, which stores HTML 
in vobject structures and serves it to web clients.  Dynamic content in 
the current model is very difficult, because there is basically one 
unchanging page that everyone looks at.  You can't customize the page 
someone sees.

With some notion of a "view" or context (session?) parameters, the VOS 
structure used to generate the page could be affected by these 
parameters.

I'm still not sure how this will work.  The two possible strategies I've 
considered so far are a) to have some intrinsic "parameters context" 
which is used by vobjects to decide what results to give back or b) to 
establish some way of working with the vobject structure so that a 
particular view is a vobject tree in which the parameterized parts have 
been altered.

For example, take area of interest management.  A user is in a sector, 
and only wants to know about avatars that are within 10m of their 
position.

In case (a), when the user asks the sector vobject for its contents, the 
sector looks at the paramters (users position, and 10m radius), filters 
the avatar list and reports it back.

In case (b), the user has their own private, discrete sector vobject.  
The sector vobject is connected to the "real" sector and updates its own 
child list when avatars come and go from the area of interest.  The user 
can query the avatar list directly.

Each approach has advantages and disadvanges, so I'm still thinking it 
over.

Comments?

[   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://www.interreality.org/pipermail/vos-d/attachments/20061202/eed8b100/attachment.pgp