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| Introduction To 3D User Interfaces |
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posted by Editor on Sunday October 14, @10:09AM
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This paper provides a concise overview of the key elements in 3D user interfaces. It includes some background on current GUIs (which are described as "2.5 D"), and reviews some factors that might drive the adoption of 3D user interfaces. It then discusses some possible design considerations for 3D UIs, including 3D window managers, 3D cursors, 3D input devices, implementation factors, and usability testing. The effectiveness of 3D UIs continues to be hotly debated, but if you believe in their potential, this is a great starting point for understanding their attributes.
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I have had the rather uninformed opinion that 3D GUI's were more gimick than useful. But this article, especially the tunnel window manager, causes me to wonder otherwise. The mouse tracking was demonstrative in how efficient it is.
Truth be known, most users don't manage windows, I don't think. They just hit the maximize the button and they're off. Maybe this tunnel window manager would encourage more users to multitask since window management is more automatic?
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Here are the four barriers to 3D GUIs I remain concerned about.
The dominant western culture is one of writers, not sculptors. Human content creators have centuries of experience in 2D, both writing and creating images. It's hard for 3D to become a dominant paradigm with a much smaller set of skilled content creators. And our understanding of how to improve productivity or aesthetic enjoyment with 3D is just much less developed. This would likely be fixed if the 3D bandwagon takes off, but its a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Navigating 3D is hard- 3D interfaces typically don't have enough constraints. 3D potentially offers 6 degrees of freedom, and too many choices makes for a confusing and non-intuitive interface. A great 3D UI must have tight constraints on which 3D navigational actions are possible. 3D Wolfenstein and Doom were largely made up of tunnels in which really only two directions were possible, and this simplification was greatly responsible for their initial playability. Only after users figured out how to travel down corridors could level designers branch out into more elaborate outdoor designs. Even then, popular first-person shooters have mostly eschewed flying due to the complexity of the interface required for taking advantage of the additional degrees of freedom present (e.g. by not always traveling along the ground). VRML-oriented 3D content creators seem IMHO to have been remarkably slow to recognize these lessons from the gaming community. Fixable with education and broader recognition.
3D environments haven't improved productivity; i.e. demonstrated a clear ability to save people time in performing daily or office-oriented tasks. A major problem; I'd welcome counter-examples, particularly for non-niche tasks.
Tools for creating 3D are hard-to-use and complex- the learning curve to make something simple or copy and tweak someone else's work is non-trivial. The variety of approaches I've seen, from Multigen interfaces to MS's text-editable Chrome to ActiveWorlds's 3D modeling for dummies give me some hope that this problem is, eventually, fixable.
As you can tell by my "fixable" comments, I wouldn't say that 3D GUIs are doomed, but I don't see 3D GUIs succeeding without solving each of those four pretty hard problems. And since I've been paying attention to such things over the last 7 tumultuous years in 3D graphics land, I've seen a disappointing degree of progress in attacking them.
--Greg
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