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Your development team is spread out across the country but has gathered for a virtual meeting hosted on the company intranet. You're standing on a seemingly endless grid surrounded by a vast network diagram.
Upon snapping your virtual fingers, your guide appears. "Bubba," you say, "highlight every variable that won't correctly contain dates greater than or equal to Jan. 1, 2000."
Bubba splits into a depressingly large number of copies, each of which points to a problem variable. Team members sigh in unison. "It's going to be a long night," you say.
Fantasy this isn't - with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) standard, 3-D design and development tools, and powerful computers, cutting-edge companies might be scheduling such meetings next year. But even today, companies constrained by PC capabilities and communications speeds can reap the benefits of simple virtual environments.
A Web server-based bulletin board makes a great starting point for creating an interactive, virtual environment. At multimedia design firm Kinetix, for example, 45 far-flung developers use O'Reilly &...