The 3Dsia Project: More Than A 3DWM

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."

Comments

It would make tech support a lot more interesting

[Jestrzcap]

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

Re:So far it's a file manager...

[drx]

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 ...

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

[Robert Bowles]

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);