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3D GUI Project
Qbertino writes: "A guy that calls himself "matrixnan" introduced this project on NANs Blender homepage. It's gonna be a GPLd 3D GUI for Linux using Blender as construction kit. Blender is a professional freeware 3D Animation/Modelling/Applicationkonstruction kit that features Python as Plugin language (Plugins are a big deal in the 3D business). Coding of the Project uses/will use Python, C and C++. Unlike the 3Dsia project it sticks more closely to the 3rd person perpective of the classical Desktop and avoids going to deep into VR and the acompanied problems. It uses NANs reference grade 3D construcion kit and seems to be on its way quite well - and thus will probably see usability quite soon. Also take a look at some serious eye candy - the screens." I'm a little more skeptical about time frames for actually being able to run this thing, but there are lots of interesting ideas to think about.
Perhaps the linux community can bridge this gap and push towards a standardized 3-d engine and even reinvigorate the gaming potential of linux.
It's called CrystalSpace
Does my bum look big in this?
I have to agree. It seems that if the screenshots of the interface take over a minute to load, even with the connection I have at work (isn't the graveyard shift fun?), then it seems to me that it might be too graphics intensive for the vast majority of Linux users and their processors.
Now, I hate the standard background (loathe would be a better word), so I tend to create graphics backgrounds in Bryce as a screen shot to have instead of any of the crap that came on the box. But it seems to me that if a whole new interface is going to be written it should satisfy the following requirements (which are not the only ones, just what I could think of):
1) The interface should not interfere with the normal operations of the OS/computer it is hosted on.
2) It should not require so much memory or processor cycles that Windows would be preferable.
3) If it is some kind of animated "3-D" interface, it should know to turn itself off when the user starts to use any full screen apps. There is no point to waste processor time on something you are not looking at.
4) It should look appealing. I don't care if you can animate a vomit cloud as an interface. I don't want it on my computer.
5) It should be flexibly modifiable by the User. I.e., give the user some options for it as to colour schemes, animation speed, etc.
Comments?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
hehe.. that's pretty much what I was thinking! Now imagine that the characters represent files and when you click on them you can rightclick on the recyclebin and they walk over to it and do themselves in and their corpse falls there and rots for a few days. But if you decide that you want that file back you can grab a necromancer and perform a "wake dead" spell on it. Sound stupid? Now you know how I feel everytime I see people try to come up with "virtual reality" desktop interfaces. In a way you can see that it would be possible, but would it be efficient and usable? Not really.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You can minimize mouse movement by having pop-up rather than pull-down menus. In other words, when you press the 'menu' mouse button, the menu appears *in the current location* rather than at the top of the window or top of the screen. Most Windows apps have pop-up menus, but they're limited to context-sensitive stuff only. I'd prefer to have the whole menu bar accessible in this way, with an additional 'Context' item for operations on the thing you clicked on.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
That looks like what sacrifice uses. Although, they provide spells that you can click on at the bottom left of the screen if you want to instead.
Your house maybe? Directories as rooms, files as objects with a shape suggesting the contents, desktops as floors ?
Ciao
----
FB
IMO, its not so much confusion, but overhead. If windows are always maximized I dont have to waste my time resizing windows.
The desktop metaphor with a vwm that has multiple desktops that each can be scrolled through, with resizable apps is kind of cool -- especially if you have eye candy like nice wallpaper or something.
Again, IMO, I'd rather focus on the application than waste my time doing window manager maintenance like resizing windows so that I can take the killer screenshot.
Don't get me wrong, having something like a "wharf" in enlightenment, windowmaker and blackbox are extremely cool, especially if they contain applications that you gain information from frequently. It allows you to glance over and gain information without having to slide your mouse over somewhere a la the windows systray.
These guys who are all trying to make 3DUI's are going the wrong way.. they're all trying to map 2D environments into 3D space which isn't a radical thing at all. I think that a 3D interface would be really intuitive if it mimicked real life as closely as possible but removed the bottlenecks we have...distance for one. A combination of a 3D environment with voice recognition might result in a totally new type of interface. For example .. whenever someone goes to the office he actually can walk around using a keyboard or mouse (or give a voice command to go to the office) (i think if a cheap 3d glove could be made available it'd be great)... he'd give a voice command to his secretary to send a letter which he would dictate....if he had to have a video conference he'd go to a conference hall in the virtual building and everyone's video would be displayed in the hall.
2D interfaces are intuitive enough for people familiar with computers particularly the younger generation (heck... a CUI is the best for us geeks) but if you look at senior citizens they are totally lost even in a GUI (at least my parents are... and their friends)
"For example, what are the 4 locations on the screen to which you can move the mouse very fast? The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized"
Also a lot of potential for mishaps. *slide mouse* Oh shit, not again...
There are lots of apps out there that use the four corners of your screen but they are mostly lame. The fix of course is to have the person wait in the corner for a fixed amount of time. But why? Just write the app to be in the windows systray and then click on it or something.
...is inherently ambiguous. Why ON EARTH would you want your work, your system files and so on represented so unreliably?
Example: Try using 3DS-MAX for heavy-duty 3D polygonal modelling for a few hours. Now imagine that the undo stack is only a single level deep, and that each mistake you make has deleted a random file from your HDD. Now note that this is a package that's evolved through many years of design by a large team at a well-funded software house.
I know this isn't what you were talking about, but check out this and this. *Laugh*
This tickled the memory of the (formerly?) Apple project called "Hotsauce", which provided a fly-through, 3-D browsing environment for networked content. It ain't pretty, but then again, it ain't vapor. Yo ucan download a plugin:
http://www.xspace.net/hotsauce/Probably the only feature of the awful Mac GUI that I like is the application menu system. There is a permanent menu bar across the top of the screen, and it is used by whatever application is in the foreground at the time, whether or not it is maximized. I wonder if any X window managers offer that functionality.
I'm sorry, but this just sounds ridiculous to me. User interfaces are pretty badly designed as it is, adding more mouse buttons doesn't solve anything. It just makes it worse.
Requiring users to use more mouse buttons is a bad idea, but having more mouse buttons for those who want to use them is not. Chording systems, like the one used in the Oberon GUI, take a while to learn but are really handy once you've gotten used to them. And I've always wanted something like a high-end digitizer tablet puck for a mouse -- the standard buttons, plus a programmable keypad. In many cases, this would reduce the number of times I have to move my hand between the mouse and the keyboard.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
As somebody pointed out about 3D gaming, the interface you really want for Quake if your goal is winning is a 2D map with friends and enemies shown. You click on the enemies, with the cursor snapping to them when nearby, and they get killed. That's "the Pentagon version of Quake". Game over.
Everytime someone announces a new VR/3D environment, GUI, or WM I am reminded of a scene from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash that really stuck in my mind when I read it..
I don't have the book available to quote it, but in this scene the main character has to hack the 3D world (which he was one of the main programmers for) so he can spy on the bad guys unseen. So he logs into the world, hops on the VR subway to his house, goes into his VR room, sits down at his VR desk and (drum roll please) switches over to a 2D UI.
It's a small section, only about 2 pages long. The reason why is something like it being preferred by true hackers because it is the fastest most efficent way to get work done.
Every major application that we use is 2D. Does it really matter if the windows or menus are cool 3D objects? Maybe there just needs to be more research done on the subject. But until then I will always think of this character who developed this VR world, but drops it in a second when real work needs to be done.
Sig:
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
The keyboard isn't much of a problem, but it's tricky to get a useful rendering of 3d space on a flat monitor (Quake doesn't cut it -- we really ought to have something more immersive to be useful) and a mouse just isn't designed to plot anything other than X,Y mappings. You need some sort of way to plot a point in space -- one of those old Virtual Reality Gloves or something -- to workably interace with a 3d environment.
The problem is, as much work as it's going to take to get something like that going -- with new hardware interfaces of some kind and new software technologies to work it out -- it's still an inadequate solution to the underlying problem. The small step from 2d modeling to 3d modeling is barely worth it when you're trying to get to a representation of a, say, 1000d information space -- especially considering all the work it'll take, both on the part of developers and users.
What we really need to do is rethink how we abstract out the complexity of increasingly powerful information systems. How can we represent this data in a way that humans can grapple with? Making a 1000d interface might be theoretically possible, but people can't even handle 4d models, and some of us aren't even that great with 3d or 2d ones :)
Work like this is IMO a dead end. Until something comes along that really rethinks how we model intricately complex dataspaces, we're going to be sitting on the Desktop plateau for a while, at least in terms of actual progress towards system usability.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Actually, you're wrong. It makes use of the areas near the corners, which are the worst. The corners themselves -- the ONE PIXEL -- are easy because you can sling the mouse really hard and it will STOP there. try clicking in the very corner on windows -- there is a convenient two-pixel border that prevents this from actually helping. they waste every corner and every edge. No place on the edge of the screen in windows is used. Not one. Mac got this one right. there was an article on /. a while back, don't have the link. (And , fwiw, I use windows not mac.)
I think any desktop that tries a 3D paradigm is radical. But that isn't my point.
I want to know, how do you know what will "work" ? What standards do you use? What are your proofs?
Instead we have a whole class of armchair programmers who know practically nothing about implementing the systems they describe.
Really, now. Maybe mapping 2D operation onto 3D will work? The author of this program has proof of concept. Where's yours?
What I see there in filemanager screenshot is the same old MSexplorer panel sans scrollbar. The idea of stripping scrollbar is pretty dumb - now I couldn't do fast steps with "Directional lock". Also, an idea of notifying applications on update doesn't look good - why just not to check directory timestamps?
No signs of "3D file hieararchy" or even principles on which it will be based are shown. Mostly, since Unix file hierarchy (if we ignore links) is a planar graf (a tree), it doesn't need any 3D representation. Also, I guess it would be a PITA to work with 3D filesystem on 2D monitor. The clever use of the mouse buttons for directory tree movements is definitely cute, but I fail to see here innovative 3D design. Using mouse wheel doesn't make an application 3D, as well as creative use of bevels and shadows in window borders.
The only real 3D thing is that cube, but I'm afraid users won't like this. Just imagine your phone dialer pad in cubic shape. Would you like dialing on such a thing? Maybe there could be a trainign that will allow user to effectively use such gadget, but I fear this will be no better than plain old planar button dialer.
Now, if we had some kind of 3D control device (gloves?) and 3D display (goggles, I guess), we might have some use of such an interface. However, I don't see it (i.e., widely distributed use of gloves and goggles as primary I/O devices, replacing displays and keyboards/mouses) happening in the next 50 years.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Although you can do alot of stuff quickly in the corners of the sceen - the simple fact of life is that most of the real work - the important stuff - happens in the middle. This is one this that seems to be ignored time and time again by interface designers. How to you do the work (in the certre of the screen) without having to move back and forth constantly to change tool, which is really painful. What is really nice are context sensitive tools and menus. The best one i've seen in a while is in a cad program called Archicad. Dependeing on which bit of the model the pointer is over, you can access a pop up floating menu, giving access to tools to modify that particulr section. The menu will float around with the mouse movements while you need it, and when you don't it pops down again.Really simple - really powerful. We really need more creative/contextual tools. Not pretty pretty icons or concentrated tools in the corner of the screen.
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
Second, give the people the option of having a 3D gui, WHILE IT'S ALREADY THERE!!! This means that hitting alt-(insert desired key here) will bring your screen back to the front side cube, where most of your stuff will sit.
Third. Control. The ability to control the environment is essential. Take a lesson from Homeworld, in their 3d environment, and design it around that. Allow people to utilize the mouse for what it was intended. Object manipulation. (In this case, the object being the 3d screen itself.)
And lastly, don't worry about making everything read correctly. If someone is talented enough to squiggle thier screen around so they're looking at it backwards, they deserve to read the letters backwards too. That's a true 3D environment, after all.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
I see the the usefulness of a 3D-GUI, but most people are just trying to use a 3D interface to replace what we have now. I don't see this as being particularly useful.
Although I'm a big fan of 3D, I love the two dimensional desktop I use now. I go into my 3D accelerated games and enjoy it, but as far as the way I work, I don't see any use for a 3D interface, it would just make things clumsy.
However, when you have 3D visualisation hardware instead of standard 2D hardware (such as 3D shutter glasses, HMDs, or applications such as CAVE technology), a 3D interface makes much more sense. But designing a GUI for that interface shouldn't necessarily be going in a different direction than 2D interfaces have already gone. Projects such as C3D would seem to work best in this type of environment, along with a three dimensional windowing system that would allow for the user to grab and move the windows in any plane and tilt as they need fit to hold them around themselves. (Imagine a zero-g desk where you could position the many books and papers and tools you are using anywhere, for you to see and read or use from where you sit).
To me, that seems to be the logical application for 3D interfaces. Once those types of hardware become readily available, I'm sure that 3D GUIs will become commmonplace. For now though, since most of us are still using good ol' CRTs or LCD displays in 2D without shutterglasses, I think we should stick to regular 2D GUIs.
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Nah, 2D cards have rendering hardware, bit blitting and so on. Even the cheapest cards have this.
And X fonts will look good too...
From the link:
:)
"The programming API will take an object oriented approach that will be completely public."
Heh, what's the point in using OO if everything is public?
/me thinks he/she should reword this...
Looking from the screen shots and notcing the rather HUGE fonts, this reminds me of what computer screens look like on movies and TV. Does everything make a bell and whistle as well as have text scroll by at 110 baud?
I'd rather have smaller and easy-to-read fonts to see my files and folders instead of this. This looks more like some game's GUI.
No .. I don't think so ;)
... WHY should you POLL (argh!) the FS for information ????)
IIRC a directory-change-callback function is
in the 2.4 vfs. look on kernel-traffic for details.
(and this is a GOOD thing. I REALLY miss this feature in MOST os filebrowsers
(even SMB has support for this IIRC)
Samba Information HQ
Everybody is looking for the next revolutionary design to replace WIMP. It is funny how all the text you're reading is on a two-dimensional plane, and the only other common means of communication is voice.
A boring unintrusive UI is very good. IMHO the ultimate UI is in dedicated physical devices. Rendering them in VR is just perpetuating the personal computer beyond what it really needs to be... in other words for the people trying to shatter the mould of thinking in WIMP, they're trapped in the mould of the PC.
Actually, there's five locations on the screen that are all equally fast to reach by mouse. Tog has an excellent article on this, I'd recommend you read it.. It's called A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts, look at question 3 of the Quiz.
... throw Lara Croft in there as an 'agent' so I can stare at her ass while she fetches files for me :)
Sean
A few years ago everyone was trying to make OSes and commercial 3D engines. Now everyone is trying to make 3D GUIs.
Name five 3D GUI projects.
OK, it doesn't really have to be, but if it's going to be a GPL system they would want to use all GPL (or at least free, open source) tools.
Otherwise it's going to another KDE holy war.
--
enterfornone - logging in for a change
lol, yeah. What we really need is a lot more screen space (i.e., 4 or 5 monitors so that we can be in several applications at once without having to change tasks. That is, slightly moving my head and refocusing has much less latency than a) scanning a taskbar for a task
b)if location already "cached" end
b) finding the icon that matches your app
d)if only one app of said type open end
e) read text next to icon to isolate the window you want...
In a 3d navigable interface where you navigate around using spatial skills you would have to travel around clicking on icons with text under them or something. But how does that actually increase efficiency? Maybe if you have 124 applications open at once...
It would be kind of cool to navigate tasks by clicking on constellations or something though (or maybe not).
I've tried a lot of "alternative" interfaces and most of them are annoying and time wasting, even after forcing myself to spend a week re-training myself how, what and where to click.
From what I see here though the story is just a normal 2d interface that's been jazzed up with some 3d graphics. Nothing special.
I rather enjoy BeOS's desktop environment very crisp, clean and simple, why must we dig deep for the eye candy when half the time it breaks when running simple normal operations. Just make it fast and intuitive...
Why? Well I guess the answer is because he can, but what I really mean is why put all ths effort into an interface that, although looks 3d, is really just some pretty pictures pasted onto the same old buttons. All it does is add another level to the Mac v Windoze war ("but I can make better icons in windoze!" - "fuck that - i just boot up a c64 when I get the URGE to edit icons") What about thinking about truely new interfaces that allow people to do/create totally new things? To think in different ways, create new and insightful ideas buy linking infomation in previous unthought of ways. That is what GUI design should be about. If you want to edit icons, stick with the c64. For an example try a piece of software called Revamp. It runs ontop of Propellorhead's Rebirth. If you've got a winbox or a mac and some spare time and an liking of electronic music, give it a go. www.revamp.org
lemonade was a popular drink and it still is
A lot of people I know who use computers every day (though not power users like most /. readers) never use an application in anything but full screen mode and it makes me wonder when microsoft will stop allowing resizable windows because it "confuses users".
I'm a power user/programmer and I dislike resizable windows. I would much prefer each application to have its own screen and a way to hotkey between them. Seriously. The faux desktop interface adds more doodads and nonsense than it is worth.
2D Desktops
The desktop usually contains a 2D array of a 1D file list... However there is an implied Third Dimension that there is a depth of content under the surface of each icon. A possible 3D model may place a 2D ground map of file icons, each standing upon a 3D Pedistal which presents the file properties, like a dedication plaque, author photo, etc. Atop the pedastal would be the 3D representation of the content, its scale and depth, its motion of activity, etc.
3D Content
3D is more useful for real 3D content. It'd be great to do RAD development of houses just by a Fantasia of powers... a sorcerer's aprentice lifting walls and stairs at the wave of a hand. Actors animated by interperating the "data sock puppet." Quake designers coould go nuts!
3D Hardware
I've been waiting for videophones long before Max Headroom had them everywhere... but even a great show like that overlooked their use as a VR Interface. If you could go anywhere to use a Videophone booth, you could call your computer and communicate with speech and gesture recognition. Also, you could dial pay services for online videogaming using nothing more than the phone, navigating dungeons and swinging swords... physically or virtually. That kind of "non-appliance VR" is common since Myron Kruger's Videoplace.
Likewise, you could out-do Star Trek if we had 3D webcams and 3D projectors... even the keyboard could become a non-appliance solid-state projection, making the Trek sets look like cardboard.
Is right here.
Call me a bigot, but if this guy codes C/C++ like he does HTML, you will NEVER see this project get off of the ground. Ick.
Rami
--
rJames.org - illustration
Having recently spend two weeks building an ultimately unsucessful 3D database visualization system, (Java3D rocks!) I can tell you it's a LOT harder than it sounds, a bit like speech recognition.
The main problem is that there is no consistent paradigm for 3D interaction... no equivalent of a desktop metaphor. Users find themselves lost in space. And such systems are hard to interact with properly with a 2D screen and mouse - the missing degree of freedom create a 'modal' system that cannot be intuitive.
But, if you have to do it, here are Orinoco's tips:
1: Make everything about 20% transparent. You can't work with half the environment hidden behind the other half.
2: View control is the key. Don't make the user have to spin and rotate. Let them pick objects of interest, and then move the camera to a good view of it.
3: Don't try to model a complete 3D environment. Instead, make it "2.5D", with the extra dimension used to express an intrisic scalar quantity rather than a spatial one. eg: A 2-D scatterplot, but each point is instead a bar who's height indicates something.
4: Create a 'groundplane'. Stick to stacking things above this.
5: A 'recursive boxes' scheme, with whole new scenes hidden inside pickable objects works well. (A folder metaphor, if you will)
Just consider the most effective 3D application yet - 3D modelling. Even with a perfect 1:1 correspondence between the visual representation and the underlying model, it still takes experts to manipulate the interface.
Frankly, I think 3D interfaces have to wait until we have cheap and available 3D input devices.
Finally, there's a lot of research that has been done (SIGGRAPH, to name a source) that you would be silly to ignore.
Jeremy Lee | Orinoco
The one thing they have in common is that none of them help me work faster. Why doesn't someone put more effort into developing a more intuitive command line and forget about all the cool-but-useless 3D GUI's and file managers?
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
so umm, seeing we're on the road of futility.. anyone feel like making an isometric rpg-style gui?
How we know is more important than what we know.
- The view should be always as if you are looking to the 'computer world' through a window(the screen) and behind it there are objects, some closer than others.
..., the other to move
... ).Installation programs may create their own rooms and floors.
... it looks like a cross between today desktops and DukeNukem3D (that being the last game I played, a few years ago). But why throw away good ideas? And games _are_ intuitive, after all.
- Object shapes suggest function.
- Use the mouse to point to an object (i.e. a directory 'door' or a file ), just like aiming in a 3D game.
- One mouse button can zoom the view on the pointed object, with additional text wich defines properties etc
your point of view close to the object, changing the perspective. A double click uses the object.
- Stick on movement on a plane. Walking is easier than flying. If needed, programs may create stairs and/or elevators.
- A suitable metafora could be a buiding. The ground floor is the 'raw' file-system, with a room for each directory, with doors carrying to sub-directories and to the parent directory. Other floors are user-defined 'desktops' for diffferent type of activities ( office, games, etc
- Drag and drop. Just like now, but 3D, constrained on the current 'walking plane'.
- Allow user to carry a tool box, with the most used programs/documents. Again, just like games.
- You need an easy way to turn around yorself : the mouse wheel ?
Mmm
Ciao
----
FB
I'm sorry, but this just sounds ridiculous to me. User interfaces are pretty badly designed as it is, adding more mouse buttons doesn't solve anything. It just makes it worse.
Some time ago, someone posted a link to a site discussing user interface design, which discussed some of the great ideas and concepts that are simply ignored. For example, what are the 4 locations on the screen to which you can move the mouse very fast? The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized.
Perhaps a bigger problem in this scenario is that of the menus within these windows. If they're not maximized, then to get to the menu in each window you have to click in a different location every time. This is very non-intuitive. I personally love the system on the Amiga workbench, where holding down the right mouse button anywhere inside the app would bring down the previously invisible menu at the top. Since it was at the edge of the screen, you could move and select a menu item very quickly. I'd love to see this system implement again, but I haven't yet.
Oops, kind of got a bit off topic there. I guess my point is, people who design user interfaces should really be looking at some of the great useability studies that have been done, and start implementing them before they concentrate on the eye-candy.
Maybe it's just me, but I think a 3d desktop is, by its very nature, inferior to a 3d one. When working at my office desk, I prefer things spread out in front of me (2d, like a present-day O/S desktop), rather than having everything stacked all on top of eachother (3d). The main reason is that if there is space available, things are easier to find when you can see them, rather than having to search through 3d stacks. This just seems like a solution looking for a problem (and not finding one).
And I see they've also developed a special "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) technology, too:Wow! I hope they get a patent on that, before Microsoft steals it from them!
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.