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The 3Dsia Project: More Than A 3DWM 150

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wouldn't-that-be-excellent dept.
xynopsis writes: "There's a virtual reality shell in the making called the 3Dsia project which aims to create a complete intuitive to use 3D-Environment. Inspired by William Gibson's novels, their philosophy differs completely from prevailing 3D-GUIs that just try to rebuild a windowing System in a 3D space (read 3Dwm users!). They think it's wrong ... When we are able to immerse into a 3D-Space, why should we stick to windows? Why to buttons and to form-oriented programming? The power of three dimensions lies within the freefloating forms and intuitive interaction possibilities."
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The 3Dsia project: More then a 3DWM More

The 3Dsia project: More then a 3DWM

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  • People are used to 2D interface. For example, it is much more intuitive to type text on a 2D window, since this is so much more similar to paper.

    Screens are still unable to render what would be needed for that to work correctly. The input devices would need to be changed. I mean you can't use that 2D mouse in there.

    What 3D add is the effect of perspective, which means you add depth to an environment. You need a good reason to have depth, and file navigation or system administration isn't a good reason.

    For the human brain, 3D is more complicated to seize. I know some people unable to play UT or Quake, they simply don't get the distance between objects, etc. I don't think 3D makes things easier, it just add another dimension of confusion.

    Forms wouldn't be "easier" to fill if they are in 3D, paper forms are what we're used to. They are 2D, and I'd hate to fill a tax report in 3D. Maybe I lack some vision, but right now I see no use for that. Research is always good though, so maybe something great might come out from that project (like the fact that 3D interfaces are better in movies and in novels than in reality...).

    Just some random thoughts...

    ---
    Guillaume

  • I believe that helping grok complex information is where 3D environments can help best. And there is a lot of complex information around. To illustrate, imagine one is trying to understand how a gee-wizz software system works. The 2D desktop may be good enough to read a few pages of code. Or see a couple of diagrams. Beyond that, a lot depends on how much info you can hold into your head at a time. Now imagine a 3D landscape: you see a figure made of what looks like three giant differently colored cubes, with flags on 'em that say "dbase manager", "info collector", and "presenter". Stare at "info collector" --- the other cubes fade away and this one zooms up and becomes transparent, revealing a few more multi-colored cubes inside.... Stuff you could visualize in your sleep. Of course, right *now* someone will have to convert code-text files into an arcane scripting language to make a 3D UI let you see all this. But someday we will be *creating* things in such an environment. The pessimistic views here could be the result of: (a) the fact that current UI's are too expensive or not good enough; (b) they are not working with data that *really* needs to be seen in 3D ... I read an article in New Scientist where VR systems were being used by people to detect patterns in the firing of neurons. Looking doen on a sheet of paper with "Neuron A fired Neuron B" just does not cut it, if what you want to derive is a rule like "the ... lobe activates the ... lobe...". The fact is, the human brain is pretty good at seeing patterns qualitatively in 3D. So let's cheer the pioneers. One day I might be able to say, "I knew it all along..." Why pass the chance ;-)
  • That's 0D text. 1D text would be like morse code, a series of dashes and dots or whatever, all linear.
  • I wasn't going to post, but god damn it makes me mad. Why oh why do slashdotters keep slamming 3d environment projects??? can't you see it??? i thought we were supposed to be the technically savvy type...

    let me answer your post directly: 3d environments will do to you what windows did to you a few years ago (unless you're one of those guys that refuses to use a windowing system and stays in text mode), it will increase your productivity by giving you the ability to visualize your work better. whatever your work is. for example, if you're a programmer, then you like me probably have the same problems: i need more than just a few windows open and displayed at the same time. soemtimes i need at least 10 things open at the same time in order to feel that i'm really being productive. current windows systems (whatever your flavor) are limitted to the amount of data that can be presented at any given time. (usually 4-5 windows at a time) before you start swapping from window to window...with a 3d environment in a monitor you can improve some (you'll probably be able to see those 10 windows at the same time, but not much more before resolution/readability become an issue); but a 3d environment with some kind of headset where you can _look_ around would probably be enough for me.

    same thing goes for most applications. accounting and finance (data cubes, huge financial reports, accounting books, etc.), progamming, engineering, graphics design, writting letters (you can have the rolodex, several reference documents, and the spreadsheet with the tables you're integrating all at the same time), the list goes on. actually i'm having a hard time thinking of an application that wouldn't benefit from a 3d environment.

    the point is, if all you do is just run one progarm, then stick to a windowing system, but the minute you want to have more than 2-3 windows open and displayed at the same time (which we usually want to do but end up not doing it because it's awkward) you'd be much more productive using 3d.

    as for navigation, i've said it before and i'll say it again, i can move in 3d very well playing quake and using truspace, 3dstudio max, whatever, and it's also very intuitive. i don't think navigation is an issue.
  • And if you want to remove the red eye from the snapshots of your friends you took last night you can always do a grep for the pupils, and pipe it to an awk script to replace the red with black....

    Er, no, actually, you can't.

    This is a good example of the saying "If your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems start looking like nails". A command line interface is great if your data is text. If your data is images, or otherwise is not easily represented by text, then a GUI is often needed.

    It's all about the idea of using the right tool for the job. Just sitting here, I really can't think of a good reason to use a 3d enviroment over a 2d, but I'm sure there are people out there that can. Just as there are people out there that can't figure out why people would want to use a GUI over a CLI. The computer should work the way that's best for the user, not the other way around.
  • have you guys ever thought about doing proof of concept work in blender (www.blender.nl) it is free, but not open. it would probably give you a big boost in productivity. it fully supports the language python and opengl programming (does not support vendor specific extensions). you could use python to bind to os features and have the full strength of a 3D modelling/animation/simulation package at your fingertips. when you get it the way you want it, you just backwards engineer the api's. after all, getting a framework in place that can express functions of an operating system or other high level algorithimic constructs in a meaningful way will be the hard part.

    blender also has a community of thousands.

    jim
  • OK, we do have two eyes and that gives us depth perception, but advocates of "3D" environments often say, "We live in a 3D world, why should our interfaces be 2D?"

    But while the world may be 3D, we only see in 2D. Depth perception and peripheral vision aside, our retinae receive a flattened version of the world.

    Are signs 3D, with information layerd behind other information? No. Are alphabet letters 3D, with features hidden behind others? No.

    Good interface design shows you want you need to see, and lays it out in a clear manner which draws your eye to the important information. In this respect only could I see a use for '3d' -- an interface which used 3D layering so more important items were visually closer to us.
  • RE: I wasn't going to post, but god damn it makes me mad. Why oh why do slashdotters keep slamming 3d environment projects??? can't you see it??? i thought we were supposed to be the technically savvy type...

    Well, no quite frankly. Just because something is technically more difficult or technically more interesting doesn't necessarily make it better. Microsoft Bob was supposed to be a great leap forward in usability, too.

    I mean, it may very well be really cool. I'll be watching to see how these develop, and I wish them the best of luck. I wasn't slamming 3d environments, my question was why a desktop in 3d? I can see APPS in 3d, as can you.. you said "actually i'm having a hard time thinking of an application that wouldn't benefit from a 3d environment." ...but why a 3D desktop? Some people have written some very interesting and cogent responses to same. As for having multiple windows open keeping track of 10 of them with one behind the other might be more problematic than just having more real estate to open said windows on.

  • I would have to disagree when you say that text is the most compressed, most precise form of communication. What about speech?

    After all, what is text but transcribed speech? We learned to talk before we learned to write (both as individuals, and as a species), because speech is the more immediately necessary, easier and convenient form of communication. When I write this, it's not because writing is superior to speaking, but because you are too far away to talk to. In fact, I don't know about anybody else, but when I write things like this, I'm actually saying it in my head. If there are parts to revise, I say them aloud--because humans naturally communicate verbally. Writing is an imposed form of communication. Revision of writing, then, is processed by saying it to ourselves.

    Even babies communicate by sound. When they get hungry, they cry. When they are wet, they cry. When they want comfort, they cry. They don't scribble on a piece of paper!

    The problem with writing is threefold:

    1. It is completely serial, whereas speech is only partially serial. Words are spoken at once (at the same time, they are transmitted), and processed at once. Words are written, however, letter by letter, transmitted, then processed letter by letter (although we are so good at reading it seems as though we read words, we actually read letters and then interpret them as words). This costs more time.
    2. Although speech is built on a natural ability to make various noises (and therefore, it is not much more artificial than just groaning and growling), writing is completely manufactured--we don't intrinsically move our hands in motions similar to writing letters on a page. This means there is more processing overhead.
    3. At least in modern man, the brain functions more in a verbal mode than a writing mode. We don't write to ourselves, we speak to ourselves. When we read, it is often done by saying the words inside our head. Therefore, in addition to the extra processing time required to communicate in writing, and the extra time due to serialism, we incur time when we write (by saying the words to ourselves), and when the receiver reads (by saying the words to himself). This is triple duplication of information.

    Writing is useful only when it is desirable to repeat the same speech many times, at many different times, to many different people. It is also useful when the speaker is too far away from the listener, or needs to deliver a message at any time, but cannot wait for a listener to meet him; hence we have transcripts, letters (postal) and signs.

    It is because of this, then, that I claim that speech, not text, is the most compresssed, precise form of communication. It is the most natural, and most immediate.

    However, in the world of computers, there is little speech capability, and computers are often used to record data with the intention of producing and retaining multiple copies. Therefore, speech is useless. Here text makes the most sense.

    I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.

  • I am reminded of the scene in "Contact", where the alien information is formated in 3d dimesions and the comment that multi-dimension representations are more efficient.

    The hope is that since we cannot write in 3d easily in real-life, using the computer we can move beyond our current limitations. How many times have you wanted to make a 3d model, but not had any clay, nor any easy way to place things without gravity messing up the order.

    Just because we are adapted to 2d, doesn't mean that we cannot adapt to 3d. How would you organize your desk in zero-g. Would you leave things hanging in the air? Would that be more efficient?
  • I should hasten to add that insufficient innovation has been done in purely graphical formalisms, such as Pierce Conceptual Graphs [adelaide.edu.au] to dismiss graphical interfaces as being being a good way to more directly express our concepts in a pre-verbal manner.

    Natural language interfaces are, well, "natural" and should be pursued but there is a lot of room for a synthesis that trancends graphical and textual representations. It's just that most of the thinking in this area has been very ad hoc and insufficiently disciplined to take very seriously.

  • Heh- it's 'Tron' :) (Score:3)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @03:49PM (#630052) Homepage Journal
    That's cool. What's it for?

    I use 'r3a77y k3w7' UI myself, quite often- usually more for decoration than anything else. I'm currently using a window theme on MacOS (with 'Kaleidoscope') called 'ISA Shock Absorber' and the sides of my windows have big shocks with yellow springs that stretch out as the window is expanded. It's fun to look at and nicely photorealistic and of course has no function but I like it anyway.

    That said, I've thought about the '3D desktop' myself but the only way I could realize _my_ notion of it is on Linux- which I'm not good enough to program for, at this time. But I can clearly spell it out- this is my notion of 'functionally k3w7'.

    Start with a virtual desktop, preferably one that has some depth like a large nature photograph (or a warehouse interior- anything that has depth). Make note of the color of the distance, you'll need it later.

    The desktop must be a single tiled picture- total picture several times the size of the screen, scrolling to be done in sub-screen increments to preserve familiarity with your location (or smooth scrolling- anything but jumping to an entirely changed view). This picture ideally will have reference points- for instance in a woodland scene you might habitually put system monitor information by the stream :)

    Over this 'deep' background goes- xterms. Nothing but xterms- CLI only. Not even window borders- just rects with a border the color of the default text, click to focus. I already have MacOS and don't need variations of it in Linux. We've done all that, this is about coming up with a genuinely different approach that has benefits that you would not get on Win or MacOS or anything like them. (...though MacOSX might be heading in this direction...)

    These terms are manipulated with the mouse in 3D space as follows- horizontal and vertical movement moves them laterally. A scrollwheel is required (for ideal UI) and rolling the scrollwheel _into_ the screen makes the term scale down smaller, fade its colors subtly towards the 'background color', and go behind other term windows, all at the same time. There is no 'over-ride' for any of this- it's one linear process.

    That's the gist of it- now here's the 'why' of it.

    Windowing systems are a pain- MDI is ugly and awkward, and Mac-style windowing forces you to constantly work on a 'front window' and remember what is going on in other ones, perhaps check them from time to time. You can stagger them to sort of vaguely see at least movement or new information in the unobscured region of such a window, but this is a crude hack. You can (particularly on MacOS) run extra monitors to put other windows on, but this is still somewhat klugey- wastes energy- and confuses some applications.

    My notion of a flat 3D (depth 3D?) windowing system (particularly when heavily term-centric) is about being able to visually scan really _large_ amounts of data and intuitively deal with it all in a natural way. The assumption is that you'll have lots of different terms, and will visually recognise one from another by the pattern of text on it. 'pico' does not look like 'bash' does not look like 'root-tail', especially if you have color involved and some messages are coming up in color.

    Another important assumption is that you'll have a large collection of font sizes, ranging from the customary ones to 'flyspeck' sizes. It doesn't have to be able to produce a smooth animation of a zooming window- the only requirement is that it _must_ be possible to zoom a window so far back that the individual characters are down to about 2x3 pixels in size- as well as down to one pixel in size. New fonts need to be made to do this (if I knew how I would have done it already. I can do it in MacOS but can't use the result...)

    When a term is zoomed out so far that it is postage-stamp sized, there is one major difference between it and an icon- it's 'live'. The pattern of text will be recognizable. If there is a 'postage stamp' window with system messages and suddenly there's a message in red that must be attended to, the visual scan of the whole desktop area will suddenly return a little red line on the 'postage stamp', a sure sign that something is up. This happens immediately and is its own 'notification system'. If something runs amok and a monitor window begins scrolling wildly with error messages, that 'postage stamp' becomes animated! In quieter times, a private IRC or muck conversation that's waiting on a response can be zoomed to the back- when a reply comes, the 'postage stamp' image will visibly alter and scroll a bit, and then you can zoom it forward and see what the message was.

    I don't know of any system that would so directly give access and monitoring to a very large number of processes. None of it is at all new technology- changing term font sizes is well established, virtual desktops are well established, playing with the colors of terms is well established. It's just a matter of putting it together in this way. The result would be CLI-lovers heaven- the mouse reduced to strictly an xterm manager, its role so intuitively obvious that there's nothing to learn about the windowing system, no hidden behavior at all, and everything else focussed on the xterms and the many, many programs that can interact and display things textually- and of course writing your own programs for the console is simpler than writing them for X.

    I hope to use this interface someday- many of the things I do would be suited to it. So much of what I do is processing information in text form- so much reading, typing, more reading etc... it would help me to have an interface like this so I could keep more tasks in my 'field of view' at one time.

    It would also be a wonderful mingling of form and function- with the primary task simply being display of an xterm, it would be simple to incorporate all sorts of decorative touches, such as allowing semitransparent term backgrounds for a 'frosted glass' effect, pixmaps to add more decorative borders for the term rects, terms in different colors for different tasks (or with the color dynamically changing to convey information like 'you haven't worked on me in days'). You could have dozens of projects scattered all over your virtual desktop- not icons, but the actual projects, right there ready to be pulled closer and immediately worked on.

    I guess it's strange for a Mac dude to be wanting such a full-on CLI environment, but it's not that strange really. Being a longtime Mac dude causes you to look at stuff like Eazel more sceptically. It's like 'been there done that', and now that I do know what I'm doing, what would be the most efficient, streamlined way to do that?

    Maybe I can make a demo of it on MacOS, seeing as I know I can make the requisite fonts. I might not be able to make actual terms but it should be possible to code up 'sticky notes' that at least _look_ the way they should :)

  • You aren't being very forward thinking here. It isn't so much what 3d will do for existing apps, like word processing & spreadsheets, it's what it can do for the apps of the future. The coming combination of ubiquious 3d rendering hardware and broadband internet connections has the potential to revolutionize the way we use computers to communicate. Honestly, I don't think the way we write text documents or other traditional applications will change at all. The new multi-user communications/shared experience applications will benifit the most. Personally, I can't wait to see how people will use this technology in the future.
  • In 2350 they're going to look at the global archive of this project and sigh in nostalgia. Imagine having to use a 2D display to look in to a 3D world. And the 3D displays that came shortly thereafter weren't much better. The world took a giant leap forward with the development of holodeck technology and TRUE immersive environments. But if you want to take a step back for the "Retro" experience, feel free to load the holodeck with a Circa 2005 style computer with a 2 dimensional display. It's quite the experience...

  • i just don't get it. what exactly is so unusual outrageous, cool about this?

    Go read the books Neuromancer by william Gibson ISBN 0-586-06645-4 and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson ISBN 0-14-023292-3. It's cool because (respected, quality) science fiction is turning into fact, albeit it isn't quite there yet. (I'm still downloading 3Dsia ...)

    displays are still two dimensional

    Displays are mostly 2D, but affordable 3D displays [philips.com] are available.

    Finally, it's not too bad a user interface metaphor. Many people can happily run around huge virtual worlds (Doom Quake), so squirrelling away data in rooms, picking up and dropping tools might work well when we're knee deep in data in a decade or so.

    I'm with Arthur C Clarke (Songs of Distant Earth) - keyboards will be with us for a thousand years - as will the command line. We'll just walk up to 1 zillion polygon models of teletypes and dumb ttys and type away on them.

  • Yeah, but what about all of the movies where it is protrayed in 3d? like Hackers, Jurasic Park, and many many more...

    Is it possible that eventually we end up with something out of a bad movie?
  • I work in the Advanced Technologies of my company. We have had several people come of with ideas to produce such a thing. My corporation is mainly DoD but we are also starting to get into the Commercial world.

    Some uses:

    With a VR helmet that can detect head motion... imagine this:
    You are sitting in the middle of a virtual warehouse that is a database. You see virtual cabinets and files. All you need to do is take a look up and you automatically come to some draw that contains the data you need.

    Also, more in the DoD world. You can now have users train in a virtual battle field, or be able to view what others see. Or more realistically, have sensors set up around your base, and have security able to monitor the entire base that is sent back digitally as a smaller model in real time so that MPs can use their peripheral vision to detect intrusions.

    These are just some of the many.. (that I can say) and there are many more.

    Those that do not understand the possibilities should not be involved in the process.

    You need to start now working on the things that don't make sense with todays technologies, so that you can better understand what the future brings.

    Steven Rostedt

  • Eye Candy and nothing more (Score:3)

    by GusherJizmac ( 80976 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @11:07AM (#630058) Homepage
    For the past 30+ years, many new user interfaces have been introduced. With the web explosion of the past several years, we've seen lots of new fangled UIs. None of the can compete with the original command line. Granted, the command line is hard to learn, but it has no upper bound on productivity. A GUI app or a website might be easier to learn, but it puts a severe limit on productivity.

    This 3D "world" here (much like the one in Snow Crash), is nothing more than eye candy (although the world in Snow Crash was just a plot-device). It will not serve to increase anyone's productivity. Rather, it is a neat and interesting way to look at data, but it's no revolutionary substitute for the power user.

    Plus, a 3d "desktop" is not intutive. If you think about it, a real desktop (including papers, books, etc.) is nothing but a bunch of 2d "windows" that you stack around and move about the desktop. There's nothing 3d about any of it.

    This sort of thing just isn't going to be useful. Look at the failure of VRML. People don't want this because it doesn't add value nor increase productivity.

  • Instead of that, how about having a shortcut, where we can just drop the files on the map instead of having to travel there. You could have a little pictorial representation of the daemon process and just drop the files on that.

    I hearby dub this idea 'drag-and-drop'.

    -David T. C.

  • I think you mistake my meaning, and are confusing the point I was trying to make with something else.

    I was not claiming that writing is more natural or more intuitive than speech, certainly not. That would indeed be absurd. We are naturally inclined to learn to speek, its in our biological nature as much as is learning to walk. We are not predisposed in the same way to learn to write, and the basic concepts needed for writing would not be present if one had not already learned to speak. I absolutely agree with you on this, 100% - spoken language is the more natural and intuitive of the two.

    However my original argument had nothing to do with how intuitive a form of communication is, but rather with that medium's abilities to contain precise and exact information. These are two very different issues. I would argue that the requirements of these are actually contradictory.

    The very reasons that text is non-intuitive make it actually better for clarity and precision of meaning. We long ago gave up on rote memorization and started writing all important things down for these exact reasons. Speech is more intuitive, but it is much less reliable than writing for preserving meaning.

    I am not arguing that all instances of writing are more precise and compressed in terms of meaning than all instances of speech. Naturally anyone can be obscure or vague in any medium. However the potential of writing is greater for clarity than is speech, and forms of writing have evolved that optimize meaning much better than any form of speech. A good example is the essay. The evolution of writing has developed this particular structure of communication because it is more precise and compressed in its ability to communicate a set of complexe ideas clearly and without confusion. Even the best speaker cannot be so precise as the best essay.

    The main reason for this clarity is the very fact that writing is not temporally bound the way speech is. A sentence, once spoken is gone, and must be repeated to be retransmitted. However a sentence, once written, continues to be written and can be read as many times as necessary.

    Its static nature in time also lends writing to editing, which cannot be easily done with speech. This is exactly why writing is the most significant form of communication for all serious endeavors: science, academics, law, government, etc. All rely on writing more than they do speech, because the written word can be modified until it is as absolutely correct as the language permits. Speech cannot be modified in this way, because it is gone the instant it is realized.

    Essentially I see this issue as being very different from the issue of intuitive use of communication, where of course speech reigns supreme. But as I mentioned earlier, the significant points in which forms of communication have played a role in the evolution of civilization have all been modifications upon writing, not speech. Granted that the telephone and radio and recorded audio are exceptions to this, however even in these cases the above points about editing and precision still hold true.

    One mistake you made which I think I must point out:

    "It is completely serial, whereas speech is only partially serial. Words are spoken at once (at the same time, they are transmitted), and processed at once. Words are written, however, letter by letter, transmitted, then processed letter by letter (although we are so good at reading it seems as though we read words, we actually read letters and then interpret them as words). This costs more time. "

    Speech is also serial in this nature, one can only be produced in a single-file order of syllables. Furthermore they can only be heard in whatever order the person speaks them in, whereas writing can be read in multiple orders.

    Studies in the way we read have demonstrated that once people have become fluent in a language, they do not actually process words letter by letter, but rather tend to recognize various patterns of letters as groups. That is to say, they recognize the form of a word as an entirety, not as a set of individual letters that need to be processed in linear fashion to make sense. This is why you can often mistake words for other similar words when you view them only briefly - your eye has caught the general pattern and makes an incorrect association. Related to this is the fact that as we read, we tend to only observe the topmost portions of letters, and recognize words mostly from the pattern of rises and falls in the letters that make it up; this is why all caps text is much harder to read.
    compare:

    read this text very quickly, or out of the corner of your eye.

    or

    READ THIS TEXT VERY QUICKLY OR OUT OF THE CORNER OF YOUR EYE.

    The truth is that writing is almost always faster than speaking. This has nothing to do with "processing time" in your brain, but the physical articulation in your throat. It is a common sign of a learning disorder when someone mouths out words as they read or silently "articulates" the words - often seen as a persons larynx rises and falls with the words as they read. These people tend to read at about half the speed of a normal reader.

  • What's the difference between WP DOS and everything since? WP DOS worked, dammit. Every time I tangle with some sticky stinky pile of "modern word proccessor" I resolve to hunt down a 5.25" floppy drive and see how well my copy of WP 5.1 for DOS runs in DOSEMU.
  • 3D "GUI" designers seem to be stuck on thinking of VR in terms of Gibson/Stephenson/Lawnmower Man - instead of studying what has gone before.

    Looking at what has been proposed uses for VR, rarely will you read about programming or other functions best done in 2D. About as close as you get to this is the idea of a virtual office, where you would sit down at a virtual desk, type on a virtual keyboard, and see a virtual display (in 2D) show what you are doing.

    3D GUIs can be useful, if the task fits. An earlier poster brought up the idea of seeing network layout and traffic patterns - such data visualization uses for complex data are ideal uses for 3D GUIs and VR. One could imagine any network being represented in a similar way (piping networks, electrical networks, phone networks).

    Other potential uses that have been explored with some measure of success is that of using VR to explore new designs (or designing the device/building/whatever in the VR space) - not only to model them, but to also run simulations, and see how they behave and interact (think of being able to get inside a virtual car, sit down, and finding that the gear shift isn't in a good position - before BUILDING the vehicle).

    Another use has been training (surgery, etc) - which is still up in the air as far as usefulness, because haptics research/feedback devices aren't quite up to snuff (a lot of surgery is "feel", from what I understand).

    Entertainment is the pre-eminant use, and will likely continue to be (like it or not, Quake, in all incarnations, is VR - desktop VR - still makes me wonder why low cost HMD systems haven't taken off).

    Not everything can or should be done in a 3D GUI - however, some tasks are ideal. I think what these guys are doing with 3Dsia is a good thing - not by creating a do-it-all system, but by building a framework for which tasks that are ideally suited for the environment may be developed.

    I support the EFF [eff.org] - do you?
  • Back in 1990 there was a 3d file manager floating on the net that had files as boxes in bins. quivering boxes were files that had a certian attribute and boxes that tried to get away from you were secured files (you had to know how to catch them (password netting))

    it was cool, although very alpha.. it used the shutter glasses from the origional sega to get 3d.

    Twas cool, and Hopefully I'll be able to dig up the name or URL before this story becomes closed.
  • I think I hit my head on the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority.
  • Umm.... as a medium, plain text IS 1-d. It flows from beginning to end.

    Don't confuse the dimensionality of text with the dimensionality of the graphic representation of characters which _are_ 2D.
  • 3D Linux is not only the next step it's probably the future of computers in the next 10 years. Think about it. We have peripheral vision and sound. And we can move our heads quite easily. Look at how much of our senses we're wasting when using a standard computer. I know none of these projects are designing the WM for VR helmets or any VR hardware for that matter, but wouldn't that be the next step? Basically all you need is alot of processing power and memory and the 3D computer world becomes the world that you like and don't want to go back from ... ever.
  • Unfortunately these "real uses" do not equate to anything the average desktop user needs in a standard office, which is usually where these 3D environments are targetted.

    Windowing environments are successful because they are metaphors for things that were already in use. We had forms/papers on our desk; these became the windows on our screen. However most 3D environments are not metaphors for anything we've got already. Why make a 3D computer model of an office, complete with desk, organiser, phone, filing cabinet, and so on, if the physical desk, organiser, phone, and filing cabinet work just as well?

    In general, the windowing environment has succeeded these physical office devices because using them has been reduced to showing the correct form onscreen. Instead of finding a document in a filing cabinet it is now like asking someone else to get it for you. Asking your secretary "Please bring me Form B out of the filing cabinet" is reduced to "cat form-b".

  • i looked at the screenshots and it looks a bit like battalion.


  • Re:3D Linux is just the next step... (Score:3)

    by bellings ( 137948 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @04:36PM (#630069)
    You are sitting in the middle of a virtual warehouse that is a database. You see virtual cabinets and files. All you need to do is take a look up and you automatically come to some draw that contains the data you need.

    Of course! Why didn't I realize this before. The "Take a Look UP!" interface.

    Hmm... I need to find the code that used to draw that widget. Well, "Take a Look UP!" Ah! There it is!.

    I need the Letter I sent to Verisign two weeks ago, and they're pretending not to have again. Well, "Take a Look UP!" There it is!

    I'm searching for data about the US income tax rate in 1980. Well, put on the 3D goggles, and "Take a Look UP!" Duh! Why couldn't I find that before?

    I'd like to find the actual glyphs used to write the name "Achilles" in the oldest copies of the Illiad that still exist. "Take a Look UP!" Man, this could make research easy!

    But wait -- I'm just being a jerk. Certainly, those huge physical card catalogs that filled rooms in most libraries were far, far more intuitive and featureful than any of the online indices we have today. Why, in those, to find a book by Mark Twain, you just hunted around for a while, until you found the room with the R-Z catalog. Then, you just found the bank with the Taz-Smith (cont.). Then, you just found the row with Tu-Sac. Then, you found the drawer with Twa-Tzam. Then, you looked through that draw until you found Twain! Oh, shit. It says: see Clemens, Samuel. Thats so intuitive! I hope to do that in VR sometime soon!

    Heck -- I don't even 2.5 dimension overlapping windows. In fact, I think 2.5 dimension overlapping window desktop metaphor is the most asinine thing I've ever seen. It works for transients, like menus and modal dialog boxes (don't get me started on modal dialog boxes), but why the hell would I want to see only half of my vi window, behind netscape? I'm waiting for the day the desktop metaphor dies. And you want to bring back card catalogs? Whatever.

    I am, however, not a luddite. There are places where "3d" presentation of information is interesting, and even useful. The "warehouse" metaphor for data is useless, though. Have you ever actually been in a warehouse? Getting things into and out of a warehouse is hard. Useful organization for items is made extremely dificult by the fact that real objects are painfully restricted to existing in only one place at a time, and that place takes up non-zero space and mass. The cool think about virtual objects is that they don't take up space, and can be an infinite number of places at once. You want to confine virtual data by the constraints of the medium we once used to store that data? Bleah.
  • Maybe now instead of typing out that horrible cp
    command, I can pick up a bundle of files, and waste 3 hours walking to my destination, asking
    directions along the way, and drop my files in
    a messy heap when I get there. A real timesaver!

    I think it would be cool, if in this environment, you could wait by your mailbox like Wile E. Coyote
    until someone replied to your emails. Spam, of course, could find you anywhere, and would be a giant anvil dropped on your head.
  • People are used to paper. Why waste time with computers?
  • Yeah, I think it sucks being stupid, too.

  • Re:3D Linux is just the next step... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You are sitting in the middle of a virtual warehouse that is a database. You see virtual cabinets and files. All you need to do is take a look up and you automatically come to some draw that contains the data you need.

    I'm glad you used such an asinine example - it illustrates my point exactly. Why is it, you think, that computers were put into place in warehouses in the first place? That's right, because _visually searching through high-density lots of similar objects sucks rocks._ Indexing systems came into use to keep people from having to visually search through large piles of crap. To suggest that a throwback to 'looking around for' some piece of hardware in a warehouse is a _good_ use of computer technology is fucking absurd. It's just stupid.

    You can now have users train in a virtual battle field, or be able to view what others see. Or more realistically, have sensors set up around your base, and have security able to monitor the entire base that is sent back digitally as a smaller model in real time so that MPs can use their peripheral vision to detect intrusions.

    Advanced modelling and simulations/data condesing are some of the only real uses for 3D VR, but they have nothing at all to do with my point or this article.

  • Re:I don't understand (Score:3)

    by BluedemonX ( 198949 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @11:15AM (#630074)
    Well, I can certainly understand this criticism. And I have ZERO problems whatsoever with the idea of new apps where 3d visualisation is a great idea. There are PRESENT applications where 3d visualisation is a great idea; engineering, architecture, scientific visualisation, medical visualisation, etc.

    My question is neither a troll nor a condemnation of the 3d environment idea PER SE - it's just a question. I understand that GUI is better from a usability standpoint over text based interfaces in a lot of instances - easier to click on an icon than remember what the executable name is. But I cannot see how an OPERATING SYSTEM will benefit from 3d visualisation: there appears to me to be a poor cost-benefit ratio given the hurdles to figure out in terms of haptics, etc. I mean, you'd have to devote tons of clock cycles just doing collision detection to "click" a "button".

    GUI design in 2D is relatively simple- find a pictural metaphor and use it. 3D design on a 2D plane is tricky. Very tricky. And 3d metaphors may exist, but I can't think of any. My question was an honest one, not a troll. I want to know where this can lead.
  • I haven't gone through the website to see if the details are any good, but the main idea is pure gold. Not in the sense of being good--who knows if 3D UIs will take off. But they are absolutely right (and nearly alone) in understanding that a 3D UI is more than 6 windows on a rotating cube just like a GUI is more than tiled DOS windows.

    I've been so frustrated trying to get this idea across that I taught myself a little OpenGL so I could try to implement something...trouble is, all I have is a vague vision, no concrete plan.
    --
    MailOne [openone.com]
  • And on what basis do you say this?

  • file managers have always, and will always, make lousy subjects in 3-space.

    File managers are like editors, everyone starts by writing one. 3Dsia say as much [sourceforge.net]:

    3Dsia is NOT only a File-system visualization, as many people think because of the prototype. It aims to be a general ...

    Humans have a strong ability to visualise things spatially. So if you've got 10,000 files (useful data, excluding system files) to organise, many people would benefit from being able to organise them as they would real world objects such as books, CDs, video tapes. Certain people are messy and untidy, yet can find stuff hidden in mountains of their junk in seconds. I err on the side of excessive tidiness (people think I must be an axe murderer), and I'm hosed if I lose or misfile something. On the other hand, mastering "find" or a database doesn't come easily.

  • didn't the girl in jurrassic park do this at the end of the movie when they were trying to restart the park? baha -- I love Microsoft becau
  • What I really want to see is something like the program "Earth" from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. The idea was that it was a 3D globe, updated to match weather data from satellites, and you could zoom in on areas, see traffic, troop movement, and all sorts of cool stuff.
  • I think unless somebody comes out with a really different and useful paradigm for computer data, 3D shells won't take off.

    Let's start by looking at mathematics. Math is a highly abstracted "environment", where there are real dimensions. In fact I think this is true for all the higher-level sciences; physicists start with complex situations and reduce them down to relatively simple equations to solve and interpret.

    So, in most of our history, what humans have been doing is reducing the number of dimensions we need to view things in. Particles colliding in a 2D world are reduced to x and y components on a piece of paper. In order to be better able to analyse situations, we aim at reducing the number of dimensions we need to think in. Einstein may have been able to think in four dimensions, but he had to simplify that to math to do anything useful.

    Now, we have a computer. The computer traditionally stores its data internally as you would store data on a piece of paper. The data has already been abstracted. In the beginning, we had text-based interfaces, which were natural extensions of the way data is stored in a computer. GUIs popped up next, because they offered benefits such as easier visualisation of data.

    However visualisation seems to always come at the cost of manipulation. While it is very useful to be able to "see" the data to understand it better, you can't do as much with it as you could if the data was represented in a more abstract form. Which is why you can do much more complex file operations in the console then in a graphical file manager; in the same way you'll find it easier to solve a mechanics problem if you express it in equations than if you imagine moving particles.

    If we move on to 3D systems... we may be able to visualise even better. But what will the cost be? Perhaps from selecting files matching "d*s.c" in console, to selecting all files starting with "d" from a GUI, we're left with clicking on all the green colour blobs we see.

    I know 3Dsia is "not a file system visualiser", but the example should still hold in most applications.

    And even worse, note that because data in a computer is stored in an abstract form, converting it "back" into a concrete 3D form would not make much sense. Everytime you abstract something, you get rid of the unneccessary details. When you have an apple on a table, it becomes a sphere on a plane, and then a set of numbers. So now I want to get back to the apple. But I can't, because I got rid of the unneccessary information that made it an apple. What do I do then? Add in my own arbitary information? What use is that? Things will just get more complex without any benefits.
  • In word, to get 'By: ' left-justified on one side of a line and 'November 11, 2000' (yes, it's a date code--shows the date I print a document, not when it's created) right-justified on the other, you have to use a table.

    It might be kludgy, but a tabstop would do the exact same thing. You would need to move it slightly depending on which month it was and how much text you had, but it's certainly managable.

    Adam

  • A virtual 3D desktop environment seems superfluous. Let's perfect Linux desktop functionality and intergration before we move into Lawnmower Man territory. IMHO, seemless webcentric applications like remote system backups and package updates is much more practicle and desirable. I resort to vim not for the sheer pleasure of doing thousands of keystrokes, but because the gui notepads available for Linux are unstable! Gnapster vomits a segmentation fault everytime i try to connect to an OpenNAP server! Linux needs to focus on the important battles, like a superior web browser. No doubt i'll experiment with 3Dsia, and i hope they succeed - but i'll choose substance over style anytime. Linux absolutely owns, and the manic speed of Open Source development is intoxicating, but it's still got a ways to go.
  • Wow, that they are experimenting with something that isn't windows is really great! I don't know about 3D, but I mean windows has been around for 30 years, and is still pretty much the only GUI that has been tried to any extent... I mean, one would think that the IT industry is revolutionized, but then, most of the great things have been here longer than I....
  • With processing power and increases in technology leaping forward every few months, I can see why people would undertake VERY tricky feats that just seemed too difficult a few years ago - like voice control and voice dictation rather than using a keyboard. I'm not saying, and never have, that computing really reached its zenith with vi in a CLI environment, and everything else is "eye candy".

    Marshall McLuhan once said that "the medium is the message" - and astute people can figure out the social effects (message) of a given technology (medium). I'm looking FORWARD to seeing what comes out of these kinds of projects - because you're right. I am trying to wonder what's going to come from this. I guess I'm just too dumb to see where this is going and hope that the more enlightened amongst us can give me some additional insight.
  • I don't know how effective this will be, because the whole reason we use computers is to get AWAY from the desk. I mean my desk is always crammed with papers, book ets, why would I want that clutter in my computer? (Another reason I hate the UNIX directory structure!) I really do think the UI of the future is VOICE control. Think about it, even in real life, the easiest thing to do is have somebody else do your work. No file manager will ever be easier than the user just asking (or in the future, THINGING) for the report he was working on. No "Start Menu" will ever be easier than the user simply asking "Open-up Opera," or, "I need to use 3D Studio." Another thing that is imporant is tactile response. Almost as much as visual, humans are tactile creatures; they like to touch things. Integrating touch and voice into the environment, IMO, is much more effective than 3D spaces.
  • I was trying to use a simple example that would not get me into trouble by saying something that I'm not supposed to.

    SGI has and is still working on many 3D databases, that can let the user see literally hundreds of millions of records at the same time. Using shapes and colors you can see the trends of your data. Much like a graph but with more information. Something like who voted for whom in what county could be used . You can see the trends of where more people voted for Bush or for Gore. And you also could tell where it was close, unlike the charts that are shown by CNN.

    But instead of looking at a 19 inch(give or take a few inches) screen, you could be in the middle of a database, that can give you large amounts of information just by turning your head. Also, remember that you are not alone in the virtual space. You could hold a conference (if you had enough equipment) and show everyone the information you are discussing. You can also have others showing their information and you just turn you head to view the two different things.

    Again, I believe that this is the next step into advanced technologies dealing with information.

    Although I said VR helmets, we really use something that looks more like glasses.

    Steven Rostedt
  • Legecy support is a bitch. People are too damn afraid to abondon these things. I think that there should be a 7 year limit on how long software should be supported. There is really no reason to want to run old software and hardware on new environments/hardware.
  • Every time any mention of 3D file managers, wms, etc. comes up, someone tries to make that joke. We're all pretty smart people here (well, most of us), surely we could come up with some new jokes.
  • Hi folks, I'm from the 3Dsia staff, and happily noticed this story, so I'm trying to gain some new project members :-) If you're interested in helping us, subscribe to our mailinglists and get your questions answered (see here [sourceforge.net]. We are currently in a redesign phase, means we will start with a complete code rewrite soon. So if you're into OpenGL programming, 3D modelling and the kind you should have a look :-) Thnx and c'ya, Marc Marc Haisenko The 3Dsia Project alias StonedBones alias DarkDust axl@cu-muc.de
  • How would you launch an application? How would you browse a website? I see such a thing only useful for interaction with other people.
    The only way we would be able to do actual work is if we are in the real world. Else, we would already be using Quake or Half-Life to write, do presentations, or anything.
    Not to seem against it or anything, but it just seems all wrong.
  • The warehouse metaphor was a simple example, and I didn't explain it very well. I work with lots of large databases, and writing a bunch of SQL reports takes time. Especially if you want quick general information. A virtual Warehouse would be useless if it tried to simulate an actual warehouse. You need to think about dynamic rooms that use something like hypertext links. You go to a certain information, and you need to see all the related data for it. So you create a dynamic "room" that contains all the related data. You look forward, you see the main topic, around it you see the related information. You now see something in the room you want to focus on, you point and "click" on the new topic, and create a new room that contains the data related to the new topic.

    Even if you don't like these examples, you need to think more about the possibilities instead of complaining about a new technology. Yes I wouldn't want to replace my emacs environment with a 3D one, unless I find a real use for it. I strongly believe that there are many benefits from using a 3D space for some applications and databases. Now if you have a trivial database, then no, just keep it the way it is. But if you have a more complex one, it might be better to look ahead and see what you can do.

    You have a good way of putting down an idea, but I did not notice any improvements or a better one. I like criticism, but lets make it constructive please.

    Steven Rostedt
  • Thanx- serves me right for trying to be flippant. Actually your insult prompted me to look over the post (which I'd saved for my own use as well) and I spotted a misspelling- 'sceptical' should really be spelled 'skeptical'.

    Seeing as I've stuck that post on my own site (here [airwindows.com]), I must thank you for the flame as you've helped to correct a spelling error :)

    To the other AC- no, I am not on the 3Dsia mailing list :) however, they are welcome to any of my stuff if it will help them. I don't always have the capacity to implement on all of my ideas so the least I can do is let others do so if they want :)

  • well, of course i read those books - been on 2600, too.

    but the fact for me is very much that this is, well, nothing new, really. unless i can put on glasses, lean back and write air-keyboard [ala johnny mnomic] i don't see the advantage of something that will not make my job easier or have any other benefit apart from being kewl and getting aaaaahs out of the secretaries that worship me anyway - cause i mess with their desktops if they don't...

    still thanks for the info. after all, you couldn't know if i was a script kiddie... but then, as i said that i had been calculating sprites and using a C64 some 15 years ago, kinda suggests that i've been around for a while, huh?
  • but a 3d environment with some kind of headset where you can _look_ around would probably be enough for me.
    Maybe try connecting more monitors to your workstation, this is a fine enhancement i can recommend to anybody.

    Or for the lovers of distorted text, check The Visual OS and autostereoscopic display [atwww.hhi.de] from Heinrich Hertz Institute. I has at least some purpose to 3D by showing connections between programs.

  • Does anyone remember gopherspace that was around in 1996/7 ?? This looks like a crappy implementation of that.. If you haven't seen it, it's basicly a 3D interface to Gopher (remember gopher right???)
  • Good luck! I think the interesting challenge of 3Dsia will be this- what type of interaction does the new interface make possible that wouldn't otherwise be possible?

    It looks pretty obvious that being a straight filesystem isn't an optimal use for this tech. Yes, you can have a kinesthetic concept for the location of a file- though this is substantially impeded by the lack of scenery- but this is no advantage over realworld filekeeping, or the conceptual abstraction of 'folders' and contents.

    However, what _can't_ you do in the realworld? One possibility is have your papers crawling after you and reminding you of their presence. You could have a concept where your ignored files would tend to follow you about pestering you :) that, or the opposite- if you work with mostly certain files and put them down where you stand, your 'back burner' would be an identifiable virtual location- anywhere that's not near where you're working. You could go over and literally look at the files that you haven't been doing much with, or evolve several 'work areas' where you accumulate files that are meant to be 'handy'. This situation could evolve out of the reality of having to sort of files by '3D location' and keep them somewhere.

    Signposts or other identifiers need to be taken seriously in the concept- there's little point in a 3D world if it's just a huge heap of little blocks all of which look alike. You could have color and shape codings that result in 'signposts' very like the concepts of Neuromancer's visualisation of cyberspace. The 3D nature of this is to some extent useful, but frankly the only way any of this is going to become a significant improvement is if the objects are made to be dynamic, able to _do_ more than just sit there like a flat file system. You need to be able to tell a term paper, "If I haven't worked on you by the 25th, start chasing me around!". You should be able to look over your dataspace and see where you've been putting your efforts by how brightly those objects are glowing- and spot areas you've been neglecting by seeing that they are guttering and going dim. Your presence in an area should perk it up and make it more vivid. For the concept to be good it needs to be like a mental Palm Pilot- maybe it takes some getting used to but once you have the 'cyberspace' keeping track of things for you and coordinating with you, you should be able to do substantially more than you otherwise would.

    I've only done minor work in this area. I wrote a reminder-program called Staccato that I use to this day to keep track of daily events, and it did make a massive improvement in my ability to keep tabs on things and be undistracted.

    For a 3D environment to make a comparable difference, it would need to latch onto the tasks that are relevant to one's computer use, and allow you to 'offload' other stuff, more than just reminders of things to do. It would need to dynamically adjust, following your priorities, sometimes challenging them by reminding you of things you thought very important two months ago and causing you to remember them and question whether you need to devote attention to them. It can't be just 'remind me of everything I ever did, periodically'... you could even go with an algorithm that was alphabetical (today is Forgotten Project beginning with R day! Remember this one? Feel like bringing it up to date, or letting it gather more dust?) as long as the requirements were met: allowing the user to be aware of more than they can hold in their brain at one time, and keeping only a limited amount on the front burner at any one time. You'd have to be able to trust that the environment would get around to reminding you of everything you consider important- but not all at once!

    It may well be that a 3D environment can be used in this sort of way. I think using the 3D environment as _conceptual_ space rather than simulated realspace would be the important thing. However, this conceptual space would have to be _concrete_... not vague or drifting, but something you could orient yourself around just as easily as you remember what side of the room your desk is on. This doesn't mean the 3dspace must have a 'desk'. Perhaps it might have a 'drudgery tower', or 'creative outbursts sphere'. Just so long as it's predictable and consistent...

  • You don't. Actually, the whole concept of X is not to get work done, but to create hundreds of toolkits, window managers and applications that all look and behave like no other.

    How I hate it. Is it so god damn hard to copy the OS/2 WPS, one of the few UI:s made for usage?

  • Until then, it pointless to display files in 3-space. Aside from the text rendering problems, likening unordered, unfamiliar electronic bits to objects we deal with every day, like boxes and pillars, is foolish. What possible advantage can one gain by viewing files not as a list of words, but as boxes in a room?

    No, no! This is great news. With force-feedback, this will solve the problems of many out-of-shape techies. After a few months of physically moving large files from one room to another, I'll bet quite a few /.ers would build bods that will make them quite popular with the ladies. Not to mention that you'll now be on equal terms with the old school bullies who ended up working in a warehouse...

  • Command Line Interfaces Under-Rated (Score:3)

    by Baldrson ( 78598 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @11:46AM (#630099) Homepage Journal
    One of the first rules of Xerox PARC's original GUI development was "Don't mode me in!" [altavista.com].

    If you're serious about a "modeless" interface, it is hard to get less "modal" than a shell command line.

    The Perl guru Rick Klement [geocities.com] (who really likes to build specialized Tk GUIs) once commented that the reason you never see any real advances in GUIs is that the programmers who set out to develop new GUIs usually start by writing a GUI for an IDE and then quickly realize that command line interfaces are better than GUIs for for IDEs. User configurability of a GUI environment is, in a sense, user programmability. Therefore, one has to wonder whether the power given up by a GUI really buys your users enough to make up for the loss compared to, say, better text-based facilities.

    For example, more flexible and forgiving parsers with better command line generation tools (a simple example being command histories with arrow keys retrieval in shells) can go along way toward simplifying text entry in computer-understandable form.

    Recently, Dan Brumleve [brumleve.com] has been showing some simple extensions to Perl at Perl Mongers [perl.org] meetings that make writing Perl statements lines more natural and powerful -- like the determiner "it" meaning the default variable "$_" so you can say things like "store it" and the interpreter knows what you are talking about. He's put in a variety of adjectives, nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.

    Other, equally simple extensions to the parsing of a general language can make it a lot more flexible, accessible and forgiving. Automated composition assistants could pop up when they think they can help you compose text for the command line.

    Graphical interfaces are ideal for interacting with numeric continua (continuous spaces), but most abstract information is in the form of rules or natural laws derived from observations of continua. Humans are always trying to abstract their sensory perception into such codified knowledge so they can more parsimoniously speak of their inner worlds, which reflect their private interpretation of shared sensory information, to each other.

  • I understand your confusion.

    3D can benefit the searching and orginization of data, more than viewing of it, unless you want to see trends.

    This is the main reason I like a paper book more than one on the screen. If I know something is somewhare in the middle of a book, I find it is easier to flip to it than to use a scroll bar. Or if I know the approximate location of a picture, I find it easier to flip the pages and find it, then to scroll down a document and find it. Yes, books don't have that automatic search for text, but it is more of a pain if you don't know of the exact text you are looking for.

    Now imagine a three dimensional database. Where you can point to (using something like a laser pointer) and be brought to exactly the location you are looking for. By knowing where certain types of data is located, you can brouse the area useing more of your peripheral vision then a small screen.

    I mentioned the pointer since you mentioned that you can't tell when you actually touched something. A 3D interface that relies on touch is bad. This is a virtual vision interface and everthing should be determined by that. So if you had a device in you hand that was something like a laser pointer, and it would show a red dot at the location that you are pointing to in the virtual world, then you could just point and press a small button on the device to go to a location.

    As for text, I would imagine that text would not be like it is in the screen shots. You need to have shapes or colors or something else, and when you point to it, it shows the text of what it is supposed to be.

    Again, all this is in development, and we will try several things before we find out what seems to be the best. But I don't think you have to worry about the applications that should not be 3D going that way. Unless you have that pointy hair boss that thinks 3D is the new buzz word and makes you do your email in 3D.

    Steven Rostedt
  • I think in '97 or so I used a chat program done in VRML (was in win95) and it was done fairly well. The 3d was fairly good for the time, and the interface was nice. They had gate metaphors, which were used to travel to other 'worlds', and so on. The layout of a level was dependent on the theme, but one of my favorites was an outdoorsy grassy area with greek-style architecture. All users' avatars were floating heads with somewhere around 200 polygons each, with dozens to choose from. When you chatted with people (it DID support voice chat, which wasn't fun on my 33.6K modem :P) you typed (or spoke) and only people within a real-world listening distance could hear what you said, so there wasnt streams of text of voices ALL OVER THE PLACE. I wish I could remember what it was called, but perhaps a google search may turn up something! :) Anyway, Imiss it, and maybe something like that has been redone... updated... maybe? :)

    ------
    http://vinnland.2y.net/
  • Let me put it to you this way - unless you're doing graphic design with pictures, and that - is there any REAL advantage apart from typesetting between using WordPerfect for DOS and the latest newfangled "will do HTML, PDF output, with 35,000 useless features" WYSINNWYG MS Word, in terms of productivity when it comes to typing out text?

    Nope, which is why I'm still using WP5.1 for DOS. In fact, that old WP works better for me than word does. I have macros (and no, they don't have viruses in them) that let me type in spanish conveniently (no 3 or 4-keystroke combinations for accents here!), add headers and footers, keep track of contacts (yep, I wrote a rolodex program in the WP macro language. Let's see you do that in 2k of word macros), and FORMAT MY DAMN TEXT. In word, to get 'By: <name>' left-justified on one side of a line and 'November 11, 2000' (yes, it's a date code--shows the date I print a document, not when it's created) right-justified on the other, you have to use a table. I'm sorry, a table is not a formatting element: it's a data-presentation element.

    Anyway, the point of this rant is that, as you hinted at, adding features and such doesn't make a better program. I'd love to be able to buzz around in a 3D world to do my computing, but I won't touch it unless it can beat the programs I currently use for usability. Yes, that means making a word processor that can out-do WP5.1 (and I *do* make use of my ability to position individual characters within a thousandth of an inch in wordperfect), notetab (beefed-up Notepad, for HTML editing), the Gimp, etc.

    And let's not forget the biggest 3D problem is feedback...

    As for your issues with the physical gear (binocular headware, force-feedback gloves / whatever else, the problem of motion, etc.), I'd say not to worry about it. Currently, most of it is just a problem of economics, which will change when such a thing becomes popular / useful, rather than technology. There's a product which basically fubares your inner ear so it doesn't provide much in the way of orientation or acceleration information at all (sorry, I forget what it's called, or I'd put in a link), so you are forced to rely on visual cues instead, for example, and I don't see any major technological problems creeping in while we aren't looking. Having an environment that you can literally run around in could be created if someone wanted to spend the money. All you need is a lightweight I/O package (glasses, gloves, etc.), and a surface to move around on. Take a sphere, cover it with a fabric surface that can be moved around by a computer. Squish the sphere so it's flat on top to a radius of about 6 feet, and let people run on that. Whenever someone moves, the computer moves the fabric they're running on in the opposite direction so they stay more or less stationary. Just a thought, but it illustrates that it's not technology that's holding us back right now.
  • I type in Spanish too. Go to the Control Panel/Keyboard/Language panel, and change the keyboard to US 101 Key International (or something like that). This layout gives you deadkeys for accents - type ' then vowel for áéíóú, turns the right hand Alt key into an Alt Gr, - AltGr + n gives you ñ and a number of other lovely things, all with a single (or easy double) keystroke. áàãäâ?! ¼½¾
  • ...when they port a terminal to it.

    Right now it just looks like a 3d chat enviroment. This could have a lot of potential, but it will be very difficult to approach the productivity of the command line.

  • yeah! (Score:1)

    by 8bit ( 127134 )
    when I saw 3dwm I thought about getting rid of the window system. The best example of how it might work is rewriting gimp. To start the program (load plugins etc) you pick up the paintbox and then it's finished it opens up. you can draw a canvas w/ a special tool. pick up a paintbrish, dip it in a pallet and rub it on the canvas. Ohh well. Just though it was cool that someone is doing this. Read my user-info for a way that you might submerge yourself in a virtual world. (too lazy to retype.)

    Roy Miller
    :wq! DOH!
  • hah... how about that! I found the place here [m1e.com]. Was on the first page of results google turned up :)

    ------
    http://vinnland.2y.net/
  • yeah, the gibson version wasn't very fun. The stephenson metaverse was cool. If you set up a project, i'm there. It's a whole lot easier to navigate some sort of environment with which we are familiar. for most computer people that's either the physical world (still a challenge for some of us) and X-ish screens. We've already mastered the creation of x, so now it's time for a new challenge, a.k.a. a GUI that mimics the world. I like it.

  • This is a great idea. You and I should go into business, "Sferics's and Commandant's E-Z Geek Workout". We could make millions! Rather than atrophy, computer users can BUILD muscle mass in only days!

    To perfect this, though, we'd need to develop a pair of force-feedback VR sleeves, which make you move your entire arm to move the files. What to you think, the equivalent of 2 pounds per 50kb? Most people don't use files larger than a few megabytes, so a two megabyte file would weigh 80 lbs. Good deal! The problem is, a file like the compressed Mozilla tarball would weigh about 800 lbs! You'd need friends to help you move that.

    To take this further, what about untarring/ungzipping files? You could open the box and manually remove each component!

    We could "fragilize" the files, too, so that if you handled them without much care, they would become corrupt.

    NB: Quick calculations show that my MP3 directory would weigh 56000 pounds. Damn!

    I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.

  • A local company in Hamilton, New Zealand, Actual Depth [actualdepth.com] does cheap 3D monitors ($10000 NZ, $4000 US)
  • Hmmmmm... yeah... just think about mouses with 3 axis' (axisies?) A joystick with a third axis (flipper or some such) would work. Hey, maybe I can convert my nes powerglove to navigate (ok, twitch thumb twice to enter door). I'll be very interested to see what arises in this field.
  • I browsed through the site and have a few thoughts to offer.

    You know, I'm sure everyone's heard this, but let me say it again: no matter how neat, cool, amazing, awesome, etc of an idea they present, 3d window managers will never become mainstream as long as they're presented in 2d space. I.e., your computer monitor!

    Frankly, I appreciate the philosophy behind presenting data in 3d. There are a lot pf possibilities there. However, I can see how it would confuse and turn off a lot of people when viewed in 2-space.

    Now, imagine the same idea presented on something like THIS [slashdot.org]!! That's where we're heading, folks, and I can hardly wait.

    My .02

    -s

  • Actually, I'm surprised that nobody seems to have realised that you can have 2D windows in a 3D environment without ever having a problem with oblique viewing angles and difficulty of reading text.

    Simply have all the 2D panes permanently aligned to face the viewer, no matter where the viewer is located. Then you have 3D positioning but all information remains entirely readable, plus it's much fewer polys and VRAM.

    Sure, real pages can't automatically align themselves to the optimal reading angle while you move around- but so what? Virtual pages can :)

  • The funny thing is (as I said in another post, but it's a good enough point to reiterate), for the computer it would be easy as pie to align all 2D windows with the viewing angle so they are shown exactly as a 2D WM would have them- only you'd be moving in a 3D way around them.

    Nobody does this, possibly because people are more interested in making spectacularly 3D-looking screenshots than in making screenshots of a 3D window manager where you could actually _read_ Netscape and _use_ the GIMP. Without trapezoid windows the only cues it was 3D would be _movement_ cues. In use it would be shockingly different, but in screenshots it would be 2D-like.

  • Easily doable with today's tech.

    Oh yeah? It is relatively simple to do something that has 3D, is networked and multiuser.. but if you are going to do something that is intended to be good and you want people to actually use the system you have a really big project on your hands...

    Just from the top of my head: WorldForge [worldforge.org], Metaverse, Verse etc.. Maybe it would be wiser to see how they are doing and choose to join on of them.

    *Looks up*

    Yup, WorldForge is quite far enough along to give a project such as this a major leg up, and we would be thrilled to collaborate with this project (or any project) working on virtual world types of things.

    Even though us at worldforge don't speak of it a whole lot, I think we often give thought to how what we are doing could evolve into a virtual reality like system - distributed server clustering, in-game editing / building, player uploaded media, client-side scripting... All features that would be *critical* for a virtual reality-based system.

    Anyway... so even though our goals are being thrust in a medieval direction, the architecture is generic and usable for a variety of things, and certainly should lend itself as a low level base for non-game applications too.

  • Maybe we should be working on making the querying language more human readable/writable first before going to a more manual method of looking around a virtual environment, hunting and picking for a trend.
  • OK, first of all. We don't see in 3D. We are not exposing any new visible dimensions by using a "3D" OS. I mean think about it. How useful would depth information be in most common applications. About the only thing we use our depth perception for now is just discovery of an optimal method of traversal through a 3D world. And if a computer can't figure this out with the software being written for it, then the program is seriously flawed. Albeit some of the additional visible real estate will be useful to an extent, the peripheral vision extension will not be very useful since you can't exactly recognize much in that area.
  • This is akin to GUI back in the day of the command line.
    Or turn back ferther..

    Desktop publishing and user friendly interfaces came out of GUI develupment but it's douptful the first GUIs had eather.

    Printer terminals then interactive software
    Video terminals then full screen editors

    IBM PCs had CGA graphics.. why should a busness computer have any graphics at all? Then came bar graphs and pie charts.. CGA was justifyed...

    You shouldn't worry to much about why it'll be used or how it'll be used. Odds are pritty good it'll never be used at all or if it is used it'll be found to be insufficent to the task.

    Who knows what someone will dream up. Once the technology exists someone will find a way to use/abuse it.

    It was when we could have more than 64k of ram that we realised we could load whole databanks of information into ram and get faster preformence than just reading as needed off the disk.

    Eventually someone will look at this and say.. yeah.. and come up with some wonderful earth shattering idea that would make use of 3D environments.

    Here I am with a GUI web browser... but when I edit text files I go to kterm... and I'm compiling with make. Nothing GUI about that.. and my WinTV when I use it as a TV I dislike the window in the corner of my screen.. I turn on full screen mode.. it's MUCH better for watching TV...

    While I myself can only see say trying to use Slashdot in this environment or trying to code in this environment.. much of what I do is still commandline anyway..
    But a 3D envrionment is more indepth and may have some applications we aren't thinking of...

    Some times it's just hard to imagin untell you see the technology infront of you..
    Once the technology itself has manifested itself someone will see a way to apply it....
  • >Linux 1.0.13 sucked pretty big balls too. You could have argued then "Why use that crappy OS when I can get Solaris X86 or Sco?"

    At the time Solaris kinda sucked..
    SCO is close... SCO and someone else made a 64 bit Unix and was giving it away for free.. Why use Free 32 bit Linux (that sucks eggs) when you can get a pritty pimpin 64 bit os?

    Hay that is EXACTLY what I thought at the time.. I desided I wanted Linux becouse I had reason to suspect I'd never get upgrades on the 64 bit system.

    > What about if some brilliant upstart came up with a $2k 1m^3 holographic display because of this? Then would it be useful?

    Not even nessisarly brillant...
    First the means... then the application (someone writes some earth shattering app that is obveous NOW becouse he has the 3D environment) then some corprate stiff says "Well it needs this this and this" hands it off to a few techs and you have a new product.
  • I agree.

    Arguing about how a three-dimensional is or isn't useful is a far too general argument. The arguments I've heard either way are almost always fallacies. Such as the idea of needing a 3D monitor or a 3D mouse because we use a 2D monitor and a 2D mouse right now. Maybe it is true. Maybe it is not. But the truth is---we don't know. Just because it makes intuitive sense doesn't mean it is true. I would wager that a combination of 2D and 3D interfaces might be a useful experiment---because that is how the eye and mind percieves the world. But again, I am not claiming anything, just making a conjecture.

    And that is why we want these projects to be around. We all know it would be pretty cool to have a three dimensional enviroment. But one of the first things these projects are going to do is try to prove that this paradigm *can* be useful and that it *can* be productive. Perhaps not with all the common apps...perhaps with only a niche of apps. But this all an interesting experiment that I look forward to finding out what works and what doesn't. In fact, my interest has been on user interfaces for a while now...both the tradition WIMP interface, but also interfaces for the blind and the 3D interface.

    Did you hear that? *Experiment* Isn't it part of geek culture to want to find out new things? Now how are you going to find out new things if you already decide that it is a failure. But! you see a failure is a success! At least we know what approaches *don't* work. Too many of you people are still in Linux advocacy mode where you guys are constantly trying to find out who wins. This isn't a horse race where you wager on a horse to win and then gloat "I told you so" if your horse makes it. We are here to find out more about interfaces in general. I think traditional interfaces would be more useful if some 3D elements were used in it. And a 3D interface could inspire these kinds of ideas at how to make our current WIMP interfaces better. The same goes for interfaces for the blind. I would love to see some true Accessibility initiatives with our current desktop projects. Perhaps a common library that projects can link into to provide common features such as speech synthesis and brail output. And how come X-Windows doesn't have mouse trails---or does it?

    So I agree...free software isn't a spectator sport. Its an experiment. Lets see what happens instead of declaring a bet.
  • I am surprised there is such a lack of progressive thought on this subject. The question that keeps popping up is "What is the advantage of data visualization?" Well, that depends on how the data is presented. Can a two-dimensional graph more instantly convey information than a flat listing of numbers? Of course it can. What happens when we view a three-dimensional graph? We can discover even more relationships between data. Ithink this same general principle applies to a three-dimensional interface for a computer. As the authors of 3dsia point out ... it will be possible to provide visual cues as to how information reaches and is processed by your computer. For example, metaphors for socket communication and data flow can be displayed. Certainly this will improve aesthetics but it will also convey new information to the user (Hey my email won't go anywhere ... but I can see that when it flies out toward the mail host it is just hovering at its gate).

    William Gibson understood the immediacy of a three-dimensional representation of data and information ... this is how humans interact with the real world ... not from a desk and papers (unless you are a bureaucrat). This is a the most natural of interfaces that will make computers more intimate and friendly for people. This is will have the effect of broadening their use. Do you want to be a part of this or do you want to scoff at the possibilities?

  • Of course we can end up with something out of a bad movie. The phenomenon that would allow this is the same one that allows most politicians to be so dirty--the phenomenon of popular choice.

    Why do you think Windows is mediocre at best? Because the public, on the whole, doesn't demand much. Those who demand more power, go to Unix. Those who demand simplicity, go to Mac OS. Microsoft is here to cater to the masses.

    Similarly, polititians cater to the masses, and the masses don't demand much character in polititicians. Don't ask me why, that's just the way it works.

    In computing right now, the masses demand mediocrity. They want pretty icons and widgets to click on, they want a desktop where they can stick their daughter's picutre, and a place to store icons for programs they run, because they don't know how to run them otherwise. To them, a file isn't a file... A file is a picture of a sheet of paper, overlaid with a stylized "W", that says, "Letter to Mom.doc" beneath the picture. Have you noticed how there are no more directories in Windows, and there never were in the Mac OS? There are only "folders", because nobody puts sheets of paper in a directory, they stick the paper in a folder.

    In truth, directory is more accurate, because that's what it is--a directory of objects that are linked by whatever attribute the user decided to link them with. A directory isn't a special object, just a regular object containing the names of other objects. But people don't care; they want it to look like the office they've worked in for the past ten years.

    When people begin introducing 3D file and window managers, users will latch onto them, because it is all that much more like an office, rather than a computer. People don't want to use computers--they want an extra room to work in. That doesn't mean that's the appropriate choice, it's just the mediocre choice made by the masses. And commercial organizations are here to appeal to the masses.

    Many argue that the interface to a computer must become transparent. I fully agree--I should use my computer not with the skill I've developed throughout the years, but with an intrinsic understanding that comes with a near-perfect interface. That is when people no longer separate a computer from everyday life--when they are intrinsic.

    People mistakenly associate a more office-like interface with transparency. That is not the case. There is always the glaring fact that this office, no matter how carefully designed, is digital, and therefore not a perfect replica. And while people may not realize it, that is the problem that keeps interfaces from becoming transparent. Interfaces are bad enough know that people are blatantly aware of the problems of computers today. But as time progress, and the workings are hidden from people, they will stop realizing why they feel the computer has a problem, but the problem will not go away. At a subconscious level, a user will be thinking, "It looks like an office... It really does... And yet, it's not quite the same."

    Consider my example of a steering wheel in a car. It was totally unfamiliar when introduced. "What is this? I'm supposed to control this thing with that... circle?!?" Despite this, even babies understand how the steering wheel controls the care. It is based on logic that is built into our brains. A parent need only sit his three-year old in front of a video game, say, "Turn the wheel this way, and the car goes this way. Turn it the other way, and the car goes the other way." With no further explanation, the child has a full understanding of how to control the automobile. That is how intrinsic our understanding of a steering wheel is. (Not to say the three-year old is capable of actually controlling the car, but he understands.)

    We need something like this to happen to computing. Something that lies very close to our intrinsic knowledge of raw data. Unfortunately, I'm not a psychologist, nor am I a GUI specialist. All I can say is there is something better out there, but I don't know what it is. And that it can't come today... We're still spending too much time in the real world to step away from it in the digital world.

    But there is change for the better. I used to be a Windows user, and as such, I thought that the desktop-folder-icon GUI was the only way I could operate (nevermind the fact that I grew up in the DOS era). When switching to Linux, I first used KDE, and then GNOME. These most closely approximated the metaphors I was searching for. Later, I switched to WindowMaker for memory reasons (it bothers me to occupy 30M of RAM to display a panel in GNOME). WindowMaker was radically different, in that there was no real desktop, only a fixed area to hold program icons. Furthermore, I got rid of GMC, so I didn't have a file manager that built on my metaphors.

    I slowly adjusted, and eventually switched to Enlightenment for theming and window handling features that WindowMaker doesn't have. This took away my all my icons. I've adjusted completely, and now mostly spend my time typing in an rxvt session. I use the enlightenment menu, but only to launch Mozilla and rxvt. While confusing to outsiders, I feel much more productive, and free... I don't treat files as little sheets of paper, I don't treat directories as folders that contain paper. Files have become abstract objects with certain attributes, and directories have simply become lists of files. I no longer rely on metaphors, only the names "file" and "directory", because I don't have better names.

    The result? I don't sit there at the computer thinking (subconsciously or otherwise) that something is wrong with the interface. The computer interface has gone from external to intrinsic, based on my skill level. Although too complex for the average user, rxvt and Enlightenment have made my data its own object, not some bad copy of the real world.

    It is this attitude that makes people think of me as some wacko computer geek who doesn't use Windows ME (how could that be?!?), but I am the one who uses a computer without hitches. I am not bound by some other guy's idea of how things should behave. I may curse when my software is buggy, but I never say that the computer is ass-backwards. (That is a common complaint of Windows: "Who the hell thought that should do this? It should do THIS!") Although I hate to say it this way, I am at harmony with my computer.

    I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.

  • hazards (Score:2)

    by hugg ( 22953 )
    You might think it's neat, yeah, until a stray BFG blast takes out most of your MP3 archive...
  • I like the Stephenson version of cyberspace much better, where it is more like a virtual city than a flat plane with a bunch of geometric shapes sticking out of it... Sort of like Mozilla crossed with Quake 3. Easily doable with today's tech. I planned it all out years ago but never got around to coding it... Maybe I should start up a sourceforge project ;)

  • Unfortunately, they'll still be waiting for the election results from 2000.

  • This isn't tcshh, this sucks, why bother.. *wah* (Score:3)

    by xtal ( 49134 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @01:14PM (#630125)

    Come on people, what's all the bitching and moaning about? I'm reminded of the mozila threads where people bitch about it sucking. Guess what? Linux 1.0.13 sucked pretty big balls too. You could have argued then "Why use that crappy OS when I can get Solaris X86 or Sco?". Bagging on people for trying something new with their time and equipment is not cool, guys.

    So what if YOU don't like it. So what if YOU have a hard time navigating 3D space. It's not like YOU spent any money on the project, or anyone is making YOU try it out. Are you worried people will stop developing new versions of command line stuff for you? Or are you worried you might have to change? Or worse still, someone might make a tool that takes the magic out of shell scripts and prompts? If that's your preference, go ahead! Hell, nobody's arguing those are inferior. They're probably using vim, er, emacs, er.. to create the thing.. right?

    Maybe I'm being a little too harsh, but don't bag on people just because you might not find what they're doing immediately useful (a la Mozilla). Right now, the 3D interface isn't the best. But in 5 years if we've all got 400DPI screens and super-high res / refresh cards, that might change - and from what I've read on the site, that's what they're looking forward to. If anyone actually READ what they're trying to do, it isn't just a file manager, it's changing the interface completely from the system adminstration to program execution level. Is it useful on todays technology? You can argue that. What about if some brilliant upstart came up with a $2k 1m^3 holographic display because of this? Then would it be useful?

    People fear change.. but don't bag on these guys for doing something IMHO extremely cool and ambitious.

  • It would make tech support a lot more interesting (Score:4)

    by Jestrzcap ( 46989 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @01:18PM (#630126)
    Ok ma'am. This is what you need to do to fix your problem. First, walk through the green door. To your right there will be a veriticle lever. Pull it down. A door should open up below you. Pick up the red key. Walk back through the green door and go down the stairs to your right... etc.

    It would also make hacking a lot more fun.

    "sir why is there a hole in that wall"
    "uh oh.. looks like we have a hacker
  • Having to physically, without response, move things is one of the major problems of 3d interfaces. It is wearing. With keyboard I can let my hands rest on the table while typing with my fingers. The fingers are much lighter to raise than hands. Why do we write on A4-sized paper on table instead of some huge paper in vertical position? If I have to use the mouse (I wish I didn't have to), I have to move my hand. Repeating this monotonous, responseless movement for a while is tiresome. 3D interfaces would be even worse in this respect. So how to create a "light" responsive input method? I certainly wouldn't want to use a special suit and I don't think it'd be light.

    Also, I wouldn't want to wear special goggles to use the UI. They make contact with the physical world too difficult. I don't stare at the computer screen all the time, as one might think and I don't want to have "computer/goggle sessions" alike using modem to take an "internet session" vs. real 24h network connection. It is just too complicated.

    This goggle+suit system might work for FSP games and such. I don't care about them. For any other use it isn't practical. An air-projected 3d image would, on the other hand, be ideal for visualization, but we're still missing a "light" input method. It certainly isn't practical to use keyboard (or the rodent) for such. One could say voice recognizition, but I don't agree. Voicerec is the way to go for embedded tasks and remotely controlling devices at home, but it is not what I would want to use when doing real work on a workstation. The kind of voicerec that would be usefull to more than simple commands and dictation could require an AI that can practically do everything you can. Else it'd be like instructing a moron. We all hate helldesking via phone.

  • I think it's pretty common knowledge that a command line is what a "power user" uses, as this affords the most flexibility and has no upper limit on how productive you can be with it. Compare two extremes:

    1. make/vi (or emacs)/cli - steep learning curve, but incredibly flexible. You can basically develop in any way you want and once you know how to use the tools, you can fly.
    2. Visual C++ (or other IDE) - Easy to learn, takes care of a lot of stuff for you, but once you learn the tool well, you hit a wall; You still have load up a huge UI to do your work, you can't easily switch to another environment and you are basically forced to work they way the tool designer wants you to. Plus, you still have to mouse around clicking on buttons. THis is great for a begginner or someone who doesn't want to learn about their development environment, but it's hugely cumbersome for someone who develops a different way or wants more flexibility.
    All I was saying in my original post is that a 3d world for desktop work and development is not demonstrably better than what we have now. It is easy to see that it isn't going to increase productivity, but just find another way to place a limit on the ease and flexibility a person has to do work.

    I don't get why tool vendors think that it's OK to force a certain development style on developers. Why not provide flexibility?

  • We do see in 3D and you saying that depth perception is a way of viewing things supports this ...
  • ...I think the entire notion of a departure from 2D is absoultely awesome. "Go run down to the end of the boot partition, take a right, get on the scsi bus, ride it for about three stops or so, and get off at the Jaz drive".

  • I don't understand (Score:3)

    by BluedemonX ( 198949 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @10:19AM (#630143)
    exactly what it is you're supposed to gain by being able to browse your data in three dimensions.

    Certain kinds of DATA in certain kinds of APPLICATIONS might benefit from 3D visualisation: there are certain engineering applications and certain mathematical visualisation apps I can think of. However, having an ENTIRE 3D ENVIRONMENT seems to me to be a waste of time and clock cycles and energy. I am WILLING to be proven wrong.

    Let me put it to you this way - unless you're doing graphic design with pictures, and that - is there any REAL advantage apart from typesetting between using WordPerfect for DOS and the latest newfangled "will do HTML, PDF output, with 35,000 useless features" WYSINNWYG MS Word, in terms of productivity when it comes to typing out text? It seems to me that I can write just as well in this little text box in a courier font as I could in any other kind of app.

    And let's not forget the biggest 3D problem is feedback - if you're not using a binocular display (VERY expensive) figuring out exactly "how far away" something is is tricky (I don't see in 3D myself - and I can tell you I tend to stop putting things down when I feel them hit). And there's the mechanics of navigation in 3D - most of our present solutions give you shoulder strain from waving your arms around. Without touch feedback to tell you you've "touched" the "button" you're constantly guessing at what you've just done. In addition, you have the problem of some people who get violently ill when visual cues ("I'm flying forward") don't match inner ear cues ("I'm sitting still") - a situation we call VIMS (Virtually Induced Motion Sickness).

  • I think that the debate whether 3Dsia is better than 3Dwm is rather pointless. Being one of the core developers of 3Dwm myself, I know that the scopes of the two different projects are quite different. 3Dwm is all about building a general platform for 3D user interfaces (3DUIs), while 3Dsia goes for the William Gibson "cyberspace" approach. This might seem like a fine point, but there is quite a difference. Now, I am not going to stand here and say which approach is best (hey, you know which I prefer!), but I daresay that 3Dwm is a more mature system resting on a more solid system architecture (we use CORBA, heavy modularization, and object-orientation), though.

    A common misconception among most slashdotters seem to be that 3Dwm is all about "flat" windows. It is not. This is our fault, since all we've shown on our screenshots are those images of X11 and Windows desktops in 3D, but that only forms one of the cornerstones of 3Dwm (the backwards-compatibility one). 3Dwm is mainly about building 3DUI applications (like the prototype web browser you can see here [chalmers.se], here [chalmers.se] and here [chalmers.se]) for use in Virtual Reality.

    That said, I'm not about to steal 3Dsia's show in any way. Above all, good luck and have fun!

  • Re:So far it's a file manager... (Score:4)

    by drx ( 123393 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @12:18PM (#630153) Homepage
    Humans have a strong ability to visualise things spatially.
    This is not true for most people. I have worked in a VR lab for some time and was witnessing studies about spatial perception that were conducted there.

    Most test persons had quite good sense of space of some meters in front of them. After this short distance, the spatial perception usually gets very bad, let alone people that cannot see 3D at all.

    3D has numerous problems, most of them are "things are behind others and you cannot see them". If you use 3D for files or other abstract things, you must know that you are most of the time reproducing the real world which is in many cases bad. Why shall i want to walk somewhere to get info or to fly up 20 meter high towers when i can press some keys or file a search query that gives me a one-dimensional list that is easy to overlook?

    Humans have a much stronger ability to visualize things 2D than 3D. Even if you think that in your flat you have things organized in 3D, it's not true. You put things in shelves one besides another, or you make groups on the floor, or put them into drawers. You switch angle several times, but each hierarchical level is 2D.

    Overviews are always 2D, it's an abstraction of 3D, and 1D text has the largest abstraction.

    3D is great when you work with virtual real objects (architecture, industrial design, geolocial structures, driving simulation ...) or when you want very rough information about something, like "there's a hell of a lot over there and few things over there, connected with the blue stuff over there".

    It also looks cool in movies. But not for files, maps, lists, tasks, texts, archives ...

    Most people who build 3D environments just start with file systems because that's the only data structures they have at hand. I suggest to get so data that is more useful for 3D first. Like from a survey or location of oil under ground or fish population in the ocean or something ...

  • I agree with you - at least for current systems.

    The reason why a file system makes a lousy 3D object is the fact that it was never meant to be one.

    Now, start from the top down. Figure out what you want your 3D computer-world to look like, right from the beginning. Utility programs are best kept in the "garage". You want to find that program that compresses your file? Go into the garage. It'll be a clamp or a compressor.

    You want to change some system settings? Go into the drawing room, where there are reams and reams of system design plans. Find the area you want, and change it.

    Want to send mail, watch TV, get a file? Go into your communications room.

    After you've decided what "room" each and every piece of your system belongs in, you've got a file system in a very organized, very logical(to the normal human mind) manner.

    Current file system layout is based wholly on technical design issues. /bin, /usr/bin, /opt/bin, and /usr/local/bin (should) keep all your user-level programs. That way, you only need to have those four directories in your $PATH. Why not seperate each packages' files from the rest? 'cause then you would need to add each packages' 'bin' directory to your $PATH. Pain in the arse, so we don't do it.

    You get the idea.

    Dave
    'Round the firewall,
    Out the modem,
    Through the router,
    Down the wire,

  • Command Line (was: Re:I don't understand) (Score:4)

    by Robert Bowles ( 2733 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @02:26PM (#630163)

    Likewise, no UI I've seen approaches a command line in functionality. X11 to me is mostly a vehicle to manage dozens of xterms (rxvt's actually).

    Want to generate a quick histogram of hits vs. IP from an apache log spanning midnight til 12:59am?
    Try: awk '/11.Nov.2000:00:/{print $1;}' access_log | sort | uniq -c | sort
    Cooking up a little pipeline like this only takes a few seconds when you're familiar with a cli (far less time than clicking your way to "M$-Histogram LogTool", opening and closing dialogs, aargh!).

    As far as representing data with shapes, icons fall short. They generally need to be fairly large (bigger than a word) to be recognizable. Even then, they're usually accompanied with a text description or tooltips (because they simply don't provide enough data for positive identification). I fail to see how some fancy, rotating, textured solid would differ, except in compute reqs. A cave-man's iconic repesentation of chasing a gazelle requires a few square feet. A textual representation (ie. "Og chase gazelle with spear".) is far more efficient.

    Also consider a real-world desk. They're generally flat. You put papers, books, etc. on them. After thousands of years, they're still flat. No real innovation there. No significant transparent multi-layer approaches. Sure, you can use stackable paper trays and file folders, but they're essentially storage. While your paperwork is in these devices, its not being used. When you need to access something in bin-4, you take it out and put it on your flat desktop.

    On the other hand, when you don't care too much for resolution in your data, 3-D can help. Our core network topology is fairly complex, 200 machines, routers, a few dozen administrative IP ranges, lotsa' vlans across a few local directors, and thats before you count desktops/wan/etc. Most people need therapy after looking at the diagram. Some sort of 3-D visualization would go miles towards deciphering it for the younger folks, though I suspect it might be a bit awkward in Euclid-space.



    void rbowles(int signature)
    {
    signal(signature, rbowles);
    raise(signature);

  • I'd rather my desktop not look like a digital wasteland out of Tron. Vast expanses of black grids are a bit...depressing, don't you think? How about some nice grassy hills in the background or something.
    --
  • 3D actually *is* being used in various environments, but there is an appropriate time and place for everything.

    I wouldn't want 3D in my cellphone menus, for instance; I have trouble finding numbers as is. ;-) In fairness, more media can make it easier, like Samsung's voice-triggered dialing, all I'd have to do to get my wife is flip it open and say, "Carol." Likewise, there are a lot of other media that can be added to 3D to make it easier, like laser sites for "Terminator point-and-click."

    Real Uses
    When Jaron Lanier invented the Data Glove (also licensed as the less-sophisticated PowerGlove), we did something fascinating: he taught himself to juggle using VR. Place a few objects, turn down the acceleration-of-gravity dial to give yourself plenty of time to get your hand under it, and viola'! A simulator to provide the eye-hand coordination you can only learn by experience!

    Experience is a needed teacher... It's why Airlines and the military spend so much on simulators. Remember learning to drive? At first, it's all a jumble of Left-Brain rules that you try to juggle into logical order. Once you gain experience, it all transfers to Right-Brain pattern-matching and instinct.

    3D turns good surgeons into brilliant ones. In an age where your likely to get the wrong foot amputated or your liver juxtaposed with your spleen, a surgeon greatly benefits from a strong sense of visualization. Likewise for Nuclear workers and Olympic Atheletes.

    Sure, there are plenty of cases where 3D is a far-from-optimal medium for what you need, but NASA and other organizations are still advancing the state of the art.

  • So far it's a file manager... (Score:3)

    by commandant ( 208059 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @10:40AM (#630185)

    ...and file managers have always, and will always, make lousy subjects in 3-space. A file manager relies on text to convey information, namely file names and attributes. This is intrinsic to the functioning of operating systems and file systems.

    However, text is a two dimensional object--lines on paper, paint on a wall, or the facade of metal boxes that contain neon lights in them. You can't convey textual information in three dimensions, simply because there are many angles where your text will look like "|" or be otherwise illegible.

    Nobody has yet figured out a viable way to handle electronic data other than by giving it a name and attributes. It will probably be a long time before we can manage data without text.

    Until then, it pointless to display files in 3-space. Aside from the text rendering problems, likening unordered, unfamiliar electronic bits to objects we deal with every day, like boxes and pillars, is foolish. What possible advantage can one gain by viewing files not as a list of words, but as boxes in a room?

    Don't get me wrong, the concept is cool to play with, but it is completely wrong for a computer user interface. We don't need more metaphors for data. We have enough in file, desktop, window, folder, directory, and countless others. Adding box, room, pillar to the mix doesn't do any good.

    For now, the concept of file and directory is sufficiently abstract for data manipulation--when the file is perceived as a cluster of data belonging to an object with a name and set of attributes, it is easy to deal with data. Then you group these objects according to function, making a directory. So far, these are only names. But to make files look and behave like boxes, or pillars, is to set in stone a metaphor that is no good.

    It will be a long time before we handle data on its own terms. As someone once explained, the automobile was originally controlled by a series of ropes that immitated a horse's reigns. It took a while to develop the unique (yet somehow appropriate) steering wheel. Until we do the same for electronic data, we should avoid casting it into more inappropriate types.

    Someday people will look back and marvel at files and directories.

    But not today.

    I do not belong in the spam.redirect.de domain.

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