Abstract
In E. A. Abbott’s book, Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions, of 1884 he describes a fictional society that exists in only two dimensions in the form of a two-dimensional plane of length and breadth, therefore called `Flatland’. This world is inhabited by intelligent human-like beings or agents in the form of geometrical figures (Abbott, 1884, p. 3): Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagon, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows — only hard and with luminous edges — and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen reports the narrator, who is actually a square from “Flatland”.
To The Inhabitants of Space in General
E. A. Abbott, Flatland, 1884
“I come,” cried he, “to proclaim that there is a land of Three Dimensions.”… “The time is short, and much remains to be done before you are fit to proclaim the Gospel of Three Dimensions to your blind benighted countrymen in Flatland…”
E. A. Abbott, Flatland, 1884
An earlier and shorter version of this chapter has been presented as an Invited Paper/Invited Talk at WebNet ‘89 - World Conference on the World Wide Web and Internet’, 24-30 October Honolulu, Hawaii (Jensen, 1999b). Related presentations can be found in (Jensen, 1998a, 1999a).
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Jensen, J.F. (2001). Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds: Interactivity and Interaction Between Avatars, Autonomous Agents and Users. In: Qvortrup, L. (eds) Virtual Interaction: Interaction in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3698-9_2
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