The VLW has aimed to build a language that will enable future designers to make complex, malleable documents in real time and three-dimensional space. The goal is to make relationships such as size, brightness, color, transparency, and location in depth shift in response to the user's position in a document. These cues would enable readers and writers of interactive media to navigate intuitively through levels of information. Shortly before her death in 1994, director Muriel Cooper described the terrain she was exploring: "In the new electronic medium, all sorts of things are up for grabs--authorship, how people read, how people gather and generate material for their own purposes."

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© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum