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| 3D User Interface Concepts From Microsoft |
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posted by Editor on Tuesday October 09, @11:27AM
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Although Microsoft has obviously invested a great deal in the current WIMP approach to user interfaces, it is sponsoring extensive research into next-generation UI approaches, and one of the areas it is investigating is 3D user interfaces. Here is a set of screenshots of 3D UI concepts, along with a useful primer on designing 3D user interfaces. One interesting project is Task Gallery, which is intended to bring existing, unmodified Windows applications into a 3D virtual environment.
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I've always thought 3D interfaces were kind of silly. They don't address real problems. It's not that overlapping windows don't have enough freedom, it's that they have too much.
3D works just fine right now inside a window. For immersive environments, no, I don't suppose the current situation is optimal. But immervise environments aren't, as far as I can see, optimal for much of anything anyway.
Arguments that 3D opens up room for communicating more information are, frankly, naive. The human eye sees thing in 2D. There is some crude stereoscopic ability, but it's really not that reliable or useful. Putting things in 3D doesn't give an entire new dimension to information -- it just makes more ways to hide the information that exists.
Things should be as simple as possible, while as expressive as possible. 2D is the best compromise for 99% of computer use, since most computer use is language-based (which is traditionally represented in two dimensions). Language has shown itself to be far, far more capable of representing abstract notions, which are much of what we deal with on computers.
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Hear hear! Let's fix the problems we've got now before we run off and invent new ones.
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Well, I prefer to move forward rather than to stay in the same place...
But I do have something that I think should be done... A OpenGL-based Windows replacement shell put standard windows onto flat 3D objects and then whooshed them around (the classic shot was of a window _far_ in the background) and had full support for anti-aliasing and transparent windows before GDI+. Sadly, it never got beyond the "Cool Idea" stage.
Maybe Microsoft should do something like that before giving us a completely seperate Paradigm.
--WorldMaker--
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If I understand what you're saying, it sounds like "minimizing" a window would simply make it a lot smaller. Not just the window smaller, but the contents, giving the illusion of distance or something. Mac OS X comes close to this by giving you an actual thumbnail of the screen in the dock (their version of the taskbar). I think it might be a really good idea actually, if you could minimize things in that way and maybe not even limit it to appearing in a special area on the bottom of the screen. Then again, just leaving it where ever could get confusing as you try to find it under so many other windows. But what if this shrinking and growing, simulating distance, could be a more gradual thing. You could have something sort of partially minimized. I dunno, just a thought.
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I've always been really into VR, ever since I went to a conference in San Francisco as a child and they were first introducing it to the world. In the early ninties, I was of the opinion that the Internet was a failure because it was so disorganized. But it turned out that the solution to this problem wasn't organizing the data in a way that could be easily "navigated" (I am intentionally using a term that implies moving through space), but instead the illusion of space was obliterated with search engines and hyperlinks. Going from one point on the web to another takes the same amount of time regardless of where you are going. (Well, that's not 100% true, but it certainly has nothing to do with the content of the web site). I'm still a big fan of VR, but I don't think it's useful for finding or using information. We made a huge conceptual leap when we dropped the illusion of space, and trying to make a 3-D interface would likely be a big step backwards in that regard. Now, I do think 3-D interfaces might be really useful for somethings. It would be useful when you are trying to see relationships between objects where there are a lot of relationships there. Database modeling for example. But not for a normal person's UI. IMHO.
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