Umstätter, Antya; Meschkat, Steffen; Schmidt, Axel
«.ping project»

The basic idea behind «.ping» is to give the Internet a visual quality. The Internet is a world-wide medium. It creates an interdisciplinary structure that brings science, entertainment, art, politics etc, together. «.ping» aims to make this structure visible and establish an all-embracing cultural basis for network communication. The connection between the interactive nature of the internet and television's rapid transmission of images forms the basis for «.ping». So «.ping» combines the Internet computer network with television to create an interactive on-line image medium allowing viewers and internet users to participate in the programme actively. Essentially, .ping consists of three components:
The interactive map on the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web (WWW) is a graphically oriented, allocated hypermedia information system on the Internet. Internet users all over the world can call up the .ping map via an interactive map on the WWW and change it in real time. Images, sounds, objects and live camera sources flow in Internet space from all over the networked world via the «.ping» map.
The virtual camera. This is a computer program. It works like a director or a journalist who is attracted by new images and films, for example, and broadcasts these directly on television. The images can be chosen according to particular interests. The camera functions (tracking speed, focal length settings etc.) can be set individually by agreement according to the television transmitter image.
The network landscape. «.ping» translates the objects on the WWW map into 3D geometrical objects and then builds them into Internet space. The visual network space is made up of these 3D objects.

(source: http://www.emaf.de/1994/ping.html)