3D Interfaces

[handslive]

I've often (or hoped would maybe be better) that the 2D 'desktop' meme would eventually be replaced a more 3D interface. So far, what one usually sees is simply additional decoration on the original flat concept. Little polygons of content stacked limitlessly on top of each other.

One of the basic problems I've seen spouted when moving to 3D interfaces is with navigation. How does one go about arranging content, applications, and basic tools in a 3D environment. There are a number of straightforward solutions to the problem of applications and tools:

• 2D menus that can be brought up with a gesture or appropriate command
• a "spherical" style interface (which suggests the idea of infinite scrolling in any direction) where a sphere appears in front of the user that can be rotated appropriately to move to new menu items (this idea comes straight from Tad William's Otherland series)
• "open architecture" rooms designed around navigation elements (3DNA)
• single rooms with, again, application icons or shortcuts arranged in the space (3DTop) although I think this is a little flat unless there's more control over the shape of the room

But I honestly think that access to applications is usually least of our problems. What we have much bigger problems with is organizing the data associated with these applications. Newer desktop designs that associate applications with content, and this actually goes much further back to Unix CLI interfaces with the 'file' command and magic numbers at the start of files to identify different types of content. What we need help with is organizing our data space.

The normal 2D interface presents problems because of the general uniformity of appearance. Even back with Windows 98, the use of a more web-based navigational approach) allowed the user to alter backgrounds for different folders or the appearance of the file listings in different folders, like by showing thumbnails (KDE and XP use this more extensively). But providing bookmarks to common locations and showing different backgrounds is still not completely intuitive to my mind. And how many people actively consider using such memory aids when organizing their data?

I keep thinking of something Neal Stephenson hints at in Snow Crash and more explicitly John Crowley in Little Big, both of which refer to memory aids used by orators in ancient Greece. People's memory space is much more related to location, landmarks and the paths for getting places.

So, why have only one room? What we need is a way of adding new 3D spaces to the existing navigation space and building paths to these new spaces. Something that more resembles neighborhoods or large houses. I don't think Gibson's notion of cyberspace organized this way, or Stephenson's Snow Crash either, really makes much sense except in the "mall" notion of browsing and shopping. These are fine for very specific on-line experiences but not as dataspace. We need something personal for our own data, easily customizable.

What we want to avoid is the uniformity of data space, the flat uninteresting view of organizational hierarchy. That kind of thing works well for the anal retentive geek (hey, I've got 3 and 4 deep menu hierarchies on my home desktop's Start button). My mother-in-law has a single folder with everything in it. Usually with names like "New Document" and "New Document (1)" and "New Document (2)". I know she's a little more organized with her physical world. The problem is all documents look alike on the digital surface and they're all in flat, white boxes that look identical. People will probably still put stuff down and forget what they did with it, but hey, we've got search engines now on our desktops for finding things.

The ironic thing is that there are a lot of 3D games with editing tools for creating architectures and rooms that would probably do with some clean-up for the limited needs of the ordinary user. Especially if you make it possible to drop in pre-fab rooms (like themes). OEMs are distributing systems with limited 3D acceleration now so the computing needs of fairly static 3D spaces displayed in 1024x768 isn't out of reach for even a simple workstation. But most of the sample 3D desktops feel amateurish or clumsy. Why, when Doom and Quake are in the public domain now?

Comments

[mouseman.livejournal.com]

To rephrase and broaden what you've said ... the problem with 3D is the lack of a generally acceptable metaphor that has a reasonably comprehensible conceptual model behind it and a sufficiently easy and powerful means of interaction to initiate computation, storage, and retrieval of information.

Some generally random thoughts come to mind ...

Just as a joystick doesn't cut it as a pointer controller for the traditional 2D desktop metaphor, likewise a mouse probably doesn't cut it for a 3D environment. We probably need something else ... a data glove? Something else?

You bring up the idea of "room" and other similar concepts of location. But does the interface have to imply storage at location? Right now I have a place to put email that was sent from user Bob, which is in the "Bob" file which is in the "email" folder. But what about other things I associate with Bob? Well, they're not email. And email has subjects -- what if I want all the data associated by subject? In truth, I want the same piece of information in multiple places. So that might mean that information should actually live in multiple places. Or it should exist both in a single concrete place, plus be known about in multiple other contexts. So maybe that message does live in a particular file or folder or room, but when I'm looking at the topic "Pianovores" (creatures that eat pianos), I might see the message in Bob's email file, wherever it may be, as well as the speech I wrote in 2nd grade about it, and an article on a news web site somewhere else.

I'm thinking that the form of the view depends on the context of the work or task that we're working on. The hard part is what does that actually look like?

Another question -- what widgets are available in 3D? What do they look like? How do I interact with them? How are they assembled to make full user interfaces? Or would a component metaphor no longer really work in 3D? What about the input devices? What will I use?