Khyberspace | POVEarth | Rock-o-Data
Welcome to Khyberspace!
Khyberspace? You mean Cyberspace, don't you?
No, you read correctly: Khyberspace!
What is Khyberspace?
Khyberspace is a virtual Afghanistan.
A virtual Afghanistan? Another first-person shooter set against the backdrop of the Hindu Kush? Where you can choose to play either the U.S. troops or the Taleban?
No, definitely no first-person shooter! Who wants to reenact the various Afghan wars of the last decades would be really wrong here! No, Khyberspace will show Afghanistan like it was before 1978 - and how it could be today if history would have taken a more beneficial course!
O.k., I understand... but do you really want to re-create entire Afghanistan, with all its towns and villages? Such a huge country... how long do you intend to be occupied with it?
Hmmm, if I work eight hours each day on the terrain relief, at a scale of 1:100,000, I will be finished with entire Afghanistan in the year 2098... and then also bodies of water, soil types, vegetation, animals, buildings and people... with some chance it could be doable still within this millennium!
No, earnestly: of course I do not want to build Khyberspace on my but, but instead together with as many others as possible - given the fact that Khyberspace itself shall be integrated in a much larger project: POVEarth!
POVEarth?
Yes, a realistic rendition of the entire planet Earth, at a resolution as high as possible - something like a free, open-source version of Google Earth!
And what means POV?
POV stands for the Persistence of Vision Raytracer, or shortly POV-Ray - a truly outstanding scripting language for generating photo-realistic 3-D scenes!
But will interactivity not fall by the wayside then?
It's true, POV-Ray currently is not capable of realtime raytracing - but nowadays there are also 3-D systems which allow creating realtime-navigable and interactive virtual worlds (but at the expense of realism!), first of all X3D. Possibly there will be also an X3D version of Khyberspace (or even of POVEarth) in the more distant future, for the time being, my priority is with the POV-Ray version.
Oh, I think it's time to introduce myself:
Jörg "Yadgar" Bleimann
born in Cologne, Germany
55 years, 1 week, 1 day, 2 hours, 4 minutes and 27 seconds ago
Whoops... you're no Afghan at all! And I thought...
...because of my occupation with Afghanistan? That's a quite long story, which I really do not want to tell here, as this website focuses primarily on Khyberspace and POVEarth!
And what does your "stage name" Yadgar mean? Is it Afghan?
Yes, in a broad sense... properly it is Persian, but this language is also spoken and understood in Afghanistan. "Yadgar" means "monument" or also "souvenir"... I chose this name simply because its type face appealed to me!
What else could be told about me? Besides Afghanistan and 3-D graphics, I'm also enthusiastic of astronomy and space flight, electronic music, progressive rock, lynxes and sub-antarctic islands...
Sub-antarctic islands?!?
Windswept, rain-drenched islands in the middle of nowhere, penguins, albatrosses and tussock grass! A nice contrast to Afghanistan... and also a challenge to render! I really can imagine to put some emphasis on this region within the framework of the POVEarth project...
And when I'm not sitting before the computer (or synthesizer or electronic organ) and the weather is not too bad, I also can be seen bicycling around Cologne... in the long run even to Afghanistan, but I have some doubt whether it ever could happen one day!
Khyberspace | POVEarth | Rock-o-Data