Re: [-empyre-] empyrean: practical questions

["Millie Niss on eathlink" <men2@columbia.edu>]

Melinda,

I located a link to your empyrean project on www.subtle.com   It looked as
if I need a plugin called Cosmo to view/explore your environment.  When I
tried to follow your link to get the plugin, I was led to an unrelated (I
think) Computer Associates site....  So what to do?  Also, I have win 98.
192MB RAM. Not sure of speed (not my computer)  I am about to upgrade to XP,
but this is my mom's machine and she has to make backup CDs before I can do
the upgrade for her, so it may be a while.  Given these hardware
constraints, can I fully experience empyrean?

>From the opposite side of the question, I am interested in creating
immersive environments for my own work.  What is required to do this in a
basic way?  I assume I need some kind of 3D authoring environment, or can
one use VRML "by hand"?  Does one need to run a 3D app as a server for users
of a web site to be able to participate in worlds one creates?  At the
moment, I am rather constrained by living in a small, shared web hosting
system based on freeBSD.  They are not keen on their users running servers
of any sort, although they do have PHP/mySQL  and Perl installed (with
minimal modules).  If this is the ultimate hurdle, I supposed one could
create works for download off a web site, but then you couldn't have
multiple user interaction and the downloadees would need a program to run
the worlds.

Excuse the naive questions, for one who has been resolutely 2-d.  My whole
style/method/paradigm of animation is 2-d, for example using cartoon styles
which don't carry into 3 dimensions.  (see my www.sporkworld.org ,especially
the epoetry section which also contains animations, and The Chirstmas Tree
Manifesto in the webworks section.  You will see that I do not seem to be
ready to enter the third dimension.)

Millie Niss