Portals

One of the goals of Placeholder was to experiment with various techniques for representing space, time, and distance. The three environments were separated by several miles of Canadian mountains and forests. We needed a way for participants to move among them without simulating the actual traversal of the intervening landscape. We knew of a few previous experiments in the area, conducted at the NASA Ames Research Laboratory in the mid-80's, that used various permutations of windowing to allow people to move among unconnected spaces, but we were unsatisÞed with the window metaphor, Þnding it too close to the visual language of computers. Our wanderings through cultural anthropology, mythology, and folklore eventually led us to adopt the idea of active Portals that would transport people among the worlds. Our encounters with rock art and aboriginal visual symbols brought us to the spiral as an appropriate sign for the Portal.

Spider approaching a Portal to transit to another World.

When a person approached a portal closely, it emitted ambient sound from the next World to which that person would transport if they walked into the Portal. Another person in the same environment would hear these portal sounds from a distance, but upon closer approach to the portal, might hear the sound of another environment coming through the portal, since the destination of each person was determined individually by random choice. Within the Portal, time was compressed but not absent - the duration of a transit was about 10 seconds, in darkness, accompanied by an iconic set of sounds for the World they were in transit to - Cave transit sounds, Hoodoos transit sounds, and Waterfall transit sounds. People were able to see two glowing points of light representing the "grip" of each hand (if they happened to raise their hands to within their Þeld of view), and some people seemed to use these points of light to orient themselves and maintain their balance. Many questions remain about the duration of the interval (people might be too disoriented by instant teleportation, but was the transit too long?) and the visual effects of the transit (would a neutral color with the suggestion of a flowÞeld better represent this metaphorical movement through space?).

Upon their initial entry to Placeholder in the Cave World, mere humans were invisible, to themselves (save for the points of light on the hands), and to each other. They couldn't use the Portals or see the Voiceholders. All they could do was talk and explore the immediate environment of the Cave World. From the moment people entered the world the Critters were talking to them, bragging about their qualities and enticing people to "come closer." When a person's head intersected one of the Critters, he or she became "embodied" as that Critter. The Critter, now functioning as a "smart costume", changed how a person looked, sounded, moved, and perceived the world. From then on, they could interact with Voiceholder, and they could transit to the other three Worlds through the Portals.