Organizing Information in 3D

This paper deals with various aspects of organization in 3D-space. Section 2 of this paper is derived from our experiences during the making of “A Scientific Universe”, a VRML based 3D-environment for the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In this section we discuss different approaches we used to organize data in 3D. In section 3 we included some thoughts on future directions, derived from our experiences with a project that we are currently working on, known under the working title of ”NAMEisBUNT”. The goal of this project is to develop a toolbox, that enables users to retrieve information from the world wide web and to display the results in three dimensions. A spatial mapping generated by the query, enables the user to interactively evaluate the nature of the results in 3D, to retrieve the most promising items and to create his/her own archive of retrieved information.