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The inside story of Web Hopper The seeds for the Web Hopper were planted in e-mail discussions with one of its founders, Koichiro Eto. Early discussions included such questions as the following: "Don't you think it's a miracle we are connected and that we can jump from one site to another?" "Yes, but why doesn't the excitement last? (*1)" "Are we interested in the Web site or in the World Wide Web? (*2)" The Web Hopper translates http packet information about the IP address into latitude and longitude. When the http packets pass through the IWE Network Operation Center (NOC) (*3), the location information is visualized via a JAVA applet (*4) real-time base. To translate from the host name to the location information, a database on the Host name to Latitude/Longitude page at Illinois University was used. We thank Matt Gardner at the Pablo VR Group (*5). This interface shows countless visuals of "just connected moments." You might be able to grasp the Internet status quo. You can go wherever you want, but you do not need to go anywhere. You may do whatever you want. Notes: (*1) Many people remember the excitement of their first connection onto the Internet. We want to remember and relive the moment; such an experience should not be taken for granted. (*2) Even though the WWW has not been with us long, large-scale corporate Web sites have rapidly increased on it. We think that an interesting new concept on the WWW is the InterWeb, or bilateral networks. However, the large Web sites seem to prefer Web Hoppers stay in only their page. (*3) The Web Hopper opens information from the packet about only longitude and latitude. Any information for finding a host name, etc., is not included. (*4) The process of visualization is as follows:
(2) Information about latitude and longitude is applied to the ip2ll server at Illinois University (3) Information is located to the map and drawn with a Java applet. (If the ip2ll server is not working, the drawing is based on previous cache data.) |