(Editor's Note: Unfortunately, Apple—hobbled by severe financial and managerial travails—abandoned this promising technology. We'd hoped Netscape would implement it in a future version of Navigator, but that has not yet happened.)

Using ProjectX (available for PPC and 68K Macs, with a Windows version promised soon) recalls the virtual reality scene near the end of the film Disclosure—like Michael Douglas, you find yourself moving toward, through and around 3D representations of data. This environment has been dubbed the "X-space," and it can be created for the Web with the ProjectX plug-in; the plug-in—which is available for Netscape Navigator 2.0 and higher, Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 and higher, and Apple's newly released Cyberdog 1.1—is also used to navigate these three-dimensional spaces.

Apple has provided several examples of ProjectX sites, and we recommend you download the plug-in and check them out. The Yahoo site, in particular, will give you a good idea of how Web navigation—and computer navigation in general—might evolve. While ProjectX is not perfect (navigation is not completely intuitive, for example), it does provide the kind of sudden, illuminating shift in perspective that typifies a technological breakthrough.

Experience it for yourself.

(Reviewed August 15, 1996)