Portals to navigate virtual spaces
Even before the World Wide Web, linking to data non-sequentially was introduced in Apple's Hypercard. We know it today as hyperlinks or simply links in a website. Prior to this, most data was linear, such as this book or an article, where we read from the beginning to end. It took time for links to become intuitive. However, now when we see text underlined, a different color, or the mouse icon change, we know that clicking on hyperlinks takes us to another web page.
Virtual worlds have an even better navigation system—the portal. Perhaps our first portal could be attributed to the Star Trek transporter that could beam you from the Enterprise to another planet. So popular was the transporter that the phrase beam ...
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