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There used to be several companies/projects pursuing this type of interface, either for a specific application (information presentation and navigator) or for a general interface - none of the implementations ever made it so far to be publicly available (though may have been quite functional in their own right, but that fact remains unseen).
Though this does take a little bit of horsepower to run effectively, when it does it works surprisingly well. There are of course recommendations for improvements but overall I'm quite impressed.
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by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 01, @09:06PM EST (#2)
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Another 3D application that has no porpouse, no goal no reason to exist but to show off 3D graphics. Please, enough! 3D interfaces are flying cars, look for innovation elsewhere.
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This one *does* have a useful position; the ability to spacially categorize (and navigate) running applications. This is a dramatic improvement on the flat single desktop traditionally available in Windows - I would assert, even on improvement on a multi-desktopped interface (though combining that functionality with this would be massively useful - such as quickly accessed saved views of the interior or some suck).
Is it computationally expensive? No question. Is it useless? Not to me.
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by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07, @05:50AM EST (#7)
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....and then mankind orangised the hierachical systems spatially, i.e. placed the folders in one area, the drawer another, etc.
People both hierachically and *shock horror* spatially organise stuff. Wow.
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Physics requires spatial organization. However, spatial organization as a means of retrieval becomes inefficient for small space and/or large numbers of items. We easily arrange a handful of books on a desk according to our retrieval needs. To some extent we are able to arrange our personal collection of books on a shelf, but we need to decide whether we want to sort them by author, by title, by publishing date, or other criteria which cannot freely be combined -- each one book can have only two immediate neighbours. Finally, for retrieval purposes, we do not access e.g. our respective National Libraries through spatial arrangements at all. Rather, we use an electronic catalogue providing us with lists of books that might be interesting according to our queries. Which happens to be quite convenient, compared to browsing several miles of shelves.
Now tell me more about spatial organization, the Internet, applications, and laptop computer screens.
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Now tell me more about spatial organization, the Internet, applications, and laptop computer screens.
Fair enough; the many limitations listed are largely irrelevant in virtual space, especially when applied to this particular application (SphereXP).
The intended number of items, primarily running applications, is limited to only a few dozen at most, to be realistic. This wouldn't require miles of shelving, but certainly would be a pain to navigate on a task bar - here, an additional dimension is beneficial.
Deciding on a sorting criteria for the placement of those applications and icons is arbitrary - within the limited subset required, toss them wherever they make sense. Though not implemented here, and I would argue not necessary unless mulitple concurrent environments were possible, it would be possible to place that same object in several categories simultaneously without hinderance.
A catalogue is indeed missing, requiring instead some form of mnemonic for the aforementioned arbitrary placement; typical alt+tab switching is available, and any other number of task management interfaces could augment this failing.
With regards to the remainder of the bait, treatment of information as spacial objects is by and large inefficient. However, creating extradimensional representations of *relationships* is effective. One of the last things I'd want to do is walk across the web which would be slow and tedious at best. But if I can augment the swift access with a means of quickly determining a big-picture form of association, my understanding can easily be broadened as an additional mode of interpretation (right brain visual/spacial/aural) comes into play over the typical perception of data (left brain logistical/sequential/linguistic).
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by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07, @10:06AM EST (#10)
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i continue to fail to see any improvements this provides over multiple desktops.
I know i dont want smaller windows, most of the information i (and most people) manage is textual, and this information gets completely lost if we zoom, rotate and twist a window.
So what do we get, we end up using the windows only in the original way. The only diference is that we can "send them away" to nicer places.
I remember my unix workstation that i could iconize a window. then i can "send them away" whenever i want. also, i can confortably group them in the 2d space of the desktop, or any of the multiple desktops.
so, doing this, i get the same functionalit without all the travelling and extra resource cunsumption (which i dont care, because it will eventually go away). But the time spent moving windows around is expensive.
dont forget that altough we are getting bigger and bigger monitors, the best way to use most applications still is full screen. Unless of course, its a teen desktop for IM and playing music.
So if we go full screen, everything is lost!
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by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07, @11:55AM EST (#11)
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You should have a look at Focus+Context visualisations in the context of "I know i dont want smaller windows, most of the information i (and most people) manage is textual, and this information gets completely lost if we zoom, rotate and twist a window."
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The intended number of items, primarily running applications, is limited to only a few dozen at most, to be realistic. This wouldn't require miles of shelving, but certainly would be a pain to navigate on a task bar - here, an additional dimension is beneficial.
Right now I am sitting in front of a 17" screen browsing the Web for scientific papers and reading them. Observation 1: I am unable to put two such papers next to each other while keeping them readable. They'll either cover each other so only one can really be read, or the font size will become too tiny to be read at all. Observation 2: Scaled down to a size that would allow spatial organization, all scientific papers look, uh, quite similar. I feel this is the exact reason why abstractions -- catalogues -- like icons, the task bar, or tabbed browsing do exist. They do help me to manage lots of information on a screen of limited size, a feature 3D desktops have to demonstrate yet.
One of the last things I'd want to do is walk across the web which would be slow and tedious at best.
Which you don't have to -- thanks to search engines providing you with a searchable catalogue of the Web, results being presented in a linear (i.e. one-dimensinal) fashion. A great deal of the power and usefulness of search engines stems from the fact that they ignore all the fancy organization schemes people use to invent for their stuff, rather than visualizing them.
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by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 11, @05:30PM EST (#13)
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OK, please give me one example of a useful textual focus+context interface. Points will be deducted for any mention of the Perspective Wall.
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by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, @01:43PM EST (#14)
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i think a big problem with search engines these days is you cant actually search that fast. imo it would be faster if you were in a 3d space where you saw webpages as sprites.. these sprites would be clumped together in arbitrary organization ie. you have a very very large list of searches..
now you see a vast space infront of you of clumps of webpages you know each clump represents a certain search.. maybe at the center of the clump there is the webpage which match your search or maybe at the edge there is the webpages which match your search all of this would be customizable..
i think with time and training you would start to be able to visually memorize webpages .. and you would become faster and faster at narrowing searches like this ..
i also believe for a system like this you would need eye tracking software with maybe quake style controls for movement .. the computer would need to be able to tell where you are focusing and when you want to focus on something it automatically will zoom in and out depending on where you want your focus ...
i think a big problem with 3d desktops is most people really do not think like this because of the years of command line and 2d desktop training they have had ..
one good reason to use a 3d desktop is you can start to use the part of your brain that thinks in images and not in words .. which for me would be helpful
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I agree with you ... 3d desktop like this (also 3dTop etc..) are useless ... adding a new dimension add more "space" to place windows, ok ... but the space is "difficult" to be navigated ... so you put the windows near .. falling again in the 2 dimensional case (!).
But choosing a nice background and showing it to a non-geek friend he will say "WOW !" ... like watching a flying submarine.
IMHO 3d desktop are doomed to the oblivion .. as long as a cheap-easy-nice-cheap(!) 3d "mouse" is invented ...
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