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)*"
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133526
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