At Wikimedia Conference in Berlin I met with Felix from Wikimedia Ghana, who is super interested in getting more immersive media available such as 360-degree panoramic photos ("photo spheres"); I showed him the tool labs widget using panellum to do WebGL spherical photo viewing -- see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T70719#2204864 -- and he was very excited to see that it's something we could probably work out how to integrate in the nearish term.

That got me thinking more generally about new media types (video, panos, stereoscopic photos/videos/panos, 3D models, interactive diagrams, etc) and how we can extend them to support annotations and linking in a way that could create immersive visual experiences with the same kind of rich information and interlinking that Wikipedia is famous for in the world of text articles.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: "Epic saga: immersive hypermedia (Myst for Wikipedia)"

I would be real interested to hear y'all's ideas on medium to long term feasibility and desirability of this sort of system, and what we can pull more directly into the short term.

For instance I would love to get the panoramic / spherical viewers integrated in MMV, which is much easier than figuring out how to do clickable annotations in 3d environment. ;)

Medium term, I would also love to see us look at the annotation system that's on Commons done in site JS, and see if we can build a future-extensible system that's more integrated into the wiki and can be used in MMV.

Longer term, I think it'll just be nice to have these kinds of long-term goals to work towards.

Thoughts? Ideas? Am I crazy, or just crazy enough? ;)

-- brion