Very cool, if true

Quake.

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You want to use Quake as a desktop?

"So, to find my document I just have to run down this corridoor, jump over this gap, kill these three zombies and flick this switch."

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Typing is dull. Clicking is better. Circle-strafing round a spreadsheet must be even better than that.

Uh, I can't think of any uses for a 3D desktop. But that's sort of the point. Someone will come up with it, and we'll all slap our foreheads.

Remember that video we watched, with 'walls' in a 'room' acting as separate desktops? That made some sort of sense. It's not wildly different to using two monitors for Work and Play.

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There's a fair number of things I've seen that look _pretty_ and like they'd make sense, if you were in them, as opposed to looking at a single monitor. If I had a VR headset then a 3D desktop would kick ass.

In the meantime I'll just keep waiting.

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*nods* Being *in* them would work, obviously.

You should play Tron 2.0, I say again unto you.

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I have all the retro goodness I need in Darwinia...

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Ah, but!

One of the fun things the game does is throw wildly different environments at you. The mainframe is typical Tron neon. But then you get into more modern PCs, a palmtop, and the _Internet_.

The palmtop is especially pretty. Lots of clinical greys and greens. Beautiful lighting, too.

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adders.livejournal.com

No idea - I'm a journalist not an GUI designer. :-)

I was just amused about the conjunction between the concepts of "3D" and "desktop" in the original phrasing of the post, because even in the 3D world, the desktop is a work environment that tends towards the 2D.

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Which is a very good point. (Although my desktop tends towards the 3D, in bulges - perhaps a mound that showed you enough of an object to let you spot what you were looking for...)

I think the problem is that monitors are 2D. If we had a 3D display then maybe it could be used innovtatively

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cheekbones3.livejournal.com

You could have your icons on shelves :O)

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alienspacebat.livejournal.com

Exactly, a real desktop which instead of covering with tiled icons, you throw them all in a big pile marked in tray and have to sort through them all whenever you need to find them!

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Don't forget the 'spill coffee' button. =)

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makyo.livejournal.com

I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer this - I tend to regard a desktop as somewhere to put lots of command-line shell windows.

But hey, if you're looking for unnecessary new paradigms, why stop at three dimensions?

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damienw

As a card-carrying geometer/topologist, I can see arguments for higher-dimensional viz tools. But I note that all graphs embed in 3d, and all computer stuff is about graphs, so 3d will do...

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makyo.livejournal.com

As a card-carrying geometer/topologist
Ooh, me too. Well, more homological algebra these days, actually.

But I note that all graphs embed in 3d, and all computer stuff is about graphs, so 3d will do...
Yes, I guess so. I wonder if there are things we can do with computers which would require higher-dimensional user interfaces.

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freemoore.livejournal.com

spent a while thinking about this some months ago. I think the appeal is that you can engage spatial awareness more deeply with a 3d desktop (i have no proof of that, i just think it's true) but i also reckon that you need a new tool to interact with it; a mouse moves on an actual 2D desktop to control the pointer on the 3D one. Some form of VR glove would do it, i think; there are high-end medical and engineering systems which use this technology already and they really do look like the dog's bollocks. I encountered Sun's presentation on their 3D desktop at the time, and to be honest, it looked like their design team had had a bit of imagination failure; it was just a 3D desktop where you could spin the windows round. I think that the desktop metaphor will not be the one to make the 3D user interface blossom, and that proper 3D control - whole-hand motion capture with an element of haptics so that you can feel the edges of files you're touching, or similar - will make it all make sense. i'm aware of the vast difficulties involved in realising this, but there are several promising-looking projects kicking about which are tackling bits of the problem. cheap 3d goggles are *almost* useable, too - shame they don't function with lcd screens (yet).

perhaps the HCI metaphor needs to be 'trees and branches' or 'mobiles' or 'boxes full of boxes' or something. i dunno.

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I had 3D glasses, but sadly you're right, they don't work with LCD screens.

I do look forward to the next phase of interaction, but it will definitely need 3D environments, not just a 2D plane projected on a monitor.

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green-amber.livejournal.com

Bookshelves not desktop?

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Still a plane of information.

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azalemeth.livejournal.com

One good thing about having a 3D desktop _other_ than it looking like secks personified (yes, I am that much of a geek...), is that it's a nice change from the files and folders metaphor that we're used to. You can just store *so* much more in a multi-faceted shape than you could normally.

Have you seen Mac OS X.3's fast user switching? Apart from it looking _beyond_ cool, it's also very useful - I wouldn't mind something like that for my desktop, like virtual terminals, but on steriods. One for work, one for play, one for when I didn't trust the people who were in the same room as me....one that would require a password to get into....that kind of thing ^_^.

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Yes, you can do that with XP as well, but it's not 3D, per se, just multiple users.

Can you recommend me a 3D interface that is actually useful? Link or two?

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azalemeth.livejournal.com

Found this /. article- probably where I read about it first (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/01/1317209&tid=189).

If you haven't seen a vid of 10.3's fast-user switching, try looking here. (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fastuserswitching/)

I can't vouch for the XP thing, as I haven't tried it myself - most of my x86es are either running 2kpro, or suse, or gentoo (By the by, installing that on my brand new 64 bit athlon is a major pain in the....)

Fast user switching is very good in 10.3 though!

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The XP fast user switching is pretty much the same, except that it doesn't have the 3D flashiness.

And the sphere demo is kinda pretty, but doesn't actually make anything any easier to do.

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odheirre.livejournal.com

I'd break down the question into two parts - is a spatial interface good for a desktop, and are three dimensions better than two?

The spatial metaphor is one of the most ingrained in our life. So, for ease of use, it's a good start. But, it's not the best one, because spatial is by definition limited to directions. It doesn't scale well. I had to dredge up the quote by Cooper:

"It may seem clever to have your dial-up service represented by a picture of a telephone sitting on a desk, but it actually imprisons you in a bad design. The original makers of the telephone would have been ecstatic if they could have created one that let you call your friends just by pointing to pictures of them. They couldn't because they were restricted by the dreary realities of electrical circuits and Bakelite moldings."

Three dimension opens up the number of ways items can be linked. But, it makes things more complicated. So, if you have to go the way of a 3D interface because the subject matter is so complicated, you may be better off finding another metaphor.

All my opinion, of course. Did some reading on interfaces for my thesis.

You may want to check out ZUI - interesting, and may qualify as a 3D UI, depending on how it's implemented.

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Finding stuff might be quicker, in that the background of the globe you're "in" could be used for quickly locating windows you have open - much better than a task-bar with a dozen or so things in.

Those who're used to working with 3D objects could do so on their desktop - not in a window on their desktop.

You could also turn the question around and ask what you can't do in a 3D desktop (workspace?) that you can do on a 2D desktop. I'd say there's nothing, same as you can have a CLI running on your 2D desktop. So no reason not to do it and having 3D may be what's required for us to find out what use it might be.

Wheels on the side of the mouse may be a good addition to control your position in the 3D workspace, instead of having to move the mouse to the left of right of the screen. I've a feeling gloves would just tire your wrists too quickly, though they'd allow you to throw away the keyboard and type virtually, I guess...

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Finding stuff might be quicker, in that the background of the globe you're "in" could be used for quickly locating windows you have open - much better than a task-bar with a dozen or so things in.

At the moment every task I'm running is visible on my screen. If it was in 3D space, would some of them be 'behind me' and therefore harder to find?

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No need for them to be if they can currently fit on your screen. As I said, anything you can do now you could still do in a 3D workspace - including emulating the XP desktop if you wanted to. (It could just be a window in the 3D workspace, right?)

But if you use (say) 20 or so programs regularly, why not have them all open at once, but just not "near" you while you're not using them, but always in the same place, (ie, your spreadsheet's next to lamppost X in your background scene), so a rotation of the workspace will let you at them nice and quickly.

No, it's not much different to icons on the screen, but I'm sure it'd feel different and somehow more intuitive.

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It really seems like it'd be more intuitive to move your mouse to a remembered edge of a screen and rotate it towards something than to move it to the bottom of the screen and click on the name?

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Who said anything about moving the mouse? Those wheels on the side of the mouse would be used for rotating the screen. Consider them to be the same as turning your head in your virtual world.

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the-magician.livejournal.com

... I've seen a few things that I thought were interesting that worked in a 3D space (on a 2D monitor)

1) the way of representing folders as cities/islands with each file being a skyscraper (and the height representing file size or similar) as shown in Jurassic Park I can imagine working quite well for some people (maybe we could have different 3D shapes for different file types and do some sort of Battle Chess like filtering?)

2) another 3D interface had older files being "further away" (so smaller and greying out) which is a quick visual way of spotting recent documents

3) there was an interesting 3D directory tree representation I have seen where the tree was horizontal and you could "spin" each layer to display the contents (like the wheels in a fruit machine)

4) when rearranging the contents of a folder you could add various depths of "in front of" or "behind" as well as left/right/up/down as at present. Again you can imagine the 2D version of this, a standard windows desktop where you could stack icons (all the Excel files in this stack) but the order of files would also be significant. Clicking on a stack would allow you to riffle through the elements to find the file you wanted. Can be done in 2D by adding additional folders and using a file name system to sequence the files, but a stack would be easier. And a stack on a desktop is a 3D concept even if realised in 2D.

From this it becomes clear that the use of the third dimension in my examples, is to make the third dimension represent different things. In one case it is file size, in another it is change date, in a third it is a sequencing dimension.

My office at home is in 3D, and it means that I can find, say, my dictionary, by looking for the bookcase and in particular the reference shelf and then looking for the book with the appropriately coloured spine. Or if I want to find last month's credit card bill I can look for the filing cabinet, financial drawer, credit card folder and pick the bill at the front of the folder. These are 3D actions that work for me because I have a spatial memory and the combination of visual cues and appropriate sequencing make finding things easier.

And I'd say that the primary use of a desktop is in finding things (hopefully where you left them or where you've told the computer to leave them).

The idea of using a Doom-like front end to scan around the room, open the filing cabinet etc. sounds quite reasonable to me.

There are already mice with two scroll wheels and/or with sideways buttons on the single scroll wheel. Alternatively, using the scroll wheel in conjunction with a keyboard shift key (or similar) may be possible, as might some sort of control surface under the thumb on the mouse so that by moving the thumb forward/back or up/down you can control the "depth" aspect of the 3D. Other possibilities using current standard mouse shaped input devices might include the simple (press the right mouse button down and while keeping it down, use the scroll wheel to adjust depth) and the more complex (add pressure sensitive buttons under the base of the thumb and the bottom corner of the hand below the little finger so that pressing down on the "wrong" end of the mouse with either part of the hand near the wrist controls up down) through to specialist options (including foot pedals, a separate depth "knob" or slider on the keyboard. One simple option might be to have pressing BOTH mouse buttons down together and holding them down while moving the mouse could allow movement in two more dimensions (so that you can scroll up/down for depth and left/right for moving the POV around in a horizontal plane, like looking around a room)

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With a 2D interface everything is always 'in front of me' - I can get to it pretty much instantly. If things could suddenly be 'behind me' or 'above me' and therefore off-screen, I suspect I'd find it harder to find things, not easier.

And a quake-interface sounds like a terrible idea to me - I don't want to travel to get to a file - well at the moment I do travel, but it's "node to node" through a virtual tree, not actually having to move through 3D space, which would presumably be slower.

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With a 2D interface everything is always 'in front of me' - I can get to it pretty much instantly.

The problem is, it's not big enough - hence you end up with windows behind windows behind windows. And menus many layers deep just to get at something. There's heaps wrong with the current GUIs - especially Windows where everything has to be done on the one screen.

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How would making it 3D make it bigger? You're still looking at a 17" bit of screen.

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