- An open XML syntax, Information Architecture Markup Language (IAML)
- Spark, an IAML browser, authoring environment and presentation tool
- A startup located in Berkeley
people
Dan Ancona, aka da - Vizbang has
been an ongoing project of mine for at least the past five years.
Here's a picture of me from spring of 2000 (photo taken by Eric "cartman"
McCormick at an offsite for my previous job).
James Home - the designer
behind the April 2000 site redesign.
Dean Gaudet - provider of super reliable site hosting since 1998.
Rachel Perkins - helped edit an early prospectus, as well as this site.
products
IAML
is an open XML syntax that describes the structure of the
information spaces Vizbang creates. An earlier version of it is
described in this
whitepaper.
The exact syntax has not been finalized, but a brief example and commentary
can be found in this
post to xml-dev.
Spark
is an IAML client and authoring environment. Create
presentations and annotateable documents, and publish versions in IAML
as well as HTML. The key benefits Spark provides are top down and
focus + context views of data and an associative, non-hierarchical environment for
authoring and presentation. The 2D/3D environment your information lives in can vary from
rich and lush to simple and elegant.
IAML and Spark allow the description of the placement of
primarily textual information into a 3D space, and the navigation thereof with
visual links. The idea is very simple: hang page-like chunks of text
and images and other multimedia in space, and link them together with
lines that can easily be traversed. These ideas have much broader potential than
just presentations. The advanced hypertext interface that Spark implements
could apply generally to the web. Check out the weblog for more ideas and developments regarding this
ongoing work.
contact
For now, send all requests for more information to da,
da@vizbang.com. Vizbang is located in
Berkeley, and demos in the bay area or elsewhere can be arranged.
history
I've been thinking about the bits and pieces that are coming together
to form this project for at least several years, and probably longer than that. I began thinking about 3D
at IATH,
where I was hired full-time to create 3D visualizations. All of this super
fun work came from there.
I was dissatisfied with only being able to look at stuff on the
honkin' SGI I had there, I moved to California. I ended up at a little VRML company called
Intervista. I was a systems engineer there, working on
solutions for customers based on the 3D platform they were developing.
Things didn't really go as planned. We never really defined the problem that our customers
were having, so we couldn't properly solve it. We did good work on
the platform, but eventually Intervista was swallowed up and, ah,
"processed" by a huge company, which in turn was
swallowed up and "processed" by an even larger company. The whole
thing was kind of ugly, but perhaps not as ugly as such things can be.
In the meantime, after a really good party one weekend in January of 1998,
all of the bits and pieces that had been floating around in my
head clicked together and I wrote the first draft of the
whitepaper.
Once it was cleaned up, the VRML Consortium's dbwork group published
it, and I began thinking about where to go from there.
I created a VRML based demo, technology from which was used by
Intervista and received very favorably by our customers. It was too
little too late; the idea was too new, and there were no resources to
develop it there. So I left.
I've been working on it slowly ever since. The demo was dependent on
the awesome text handling in Intervista's WorldView VRML browser,
which is no longer being developed (although in
theory, Microsoft still owns the rights to it and is apparently still
trying to integrate it with Internet Explorer).
Currently, I'm working on Spark, a non-VRML dependent browser which works
with Information Architecture Markup Language (IAML), the syntax I'm
developing. Standardization is generally a good thing, but only
once there is working code and people using it. This was never really
the case with VRML; the development of the syntax was always a little
decoupled from the browser authors which were in turn generally pretty
decoupled from the customers. All the loose coupling in the system
led to VRML's eventual hibernation.
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