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3D File Manager on Linux Wins NSF Prize
MadFarmAnimalz writes "Science Magazine's reporting on the results of the NSF's Science and Engineering Visualisation Challenge and the first prize in the Illustrations category has been claimed by the Innolab 3D File Manager, which was developed on linux. Apparently this involves arranging data in a ferris wheel type structure." The data is arranged by its relationship with its content, rather than by its physical position on a hard drive or its file system.
/: bin boot cdrom dev devs etc floppy home initrd lib lost+found media mnt music opt proc root sbin tmp usr var vmdebian vmlinux vmlinux26 /bin:
arch
bash
cat
chgrp
chmod
chown
cp
cpio
csh
date
dd
df
dir
dmesg
dnsdomainname
echo
ed
egrepe--
false
fgconsole
fgrep
fuser
grep
gunzip
gzexe
gzip
hostname
kill
ksh
ln
loadkeys
login
ls
lspci
mkdir
mknod
mktemp
more
mount
mt
mt-gnu
mv
nc
netcat
netstat
pidof
ping
ps
pwd
rbash
readlink
rm
rmdir
run-parts
rzsh
sed
setserial
sh
sleep
stty
su
sync
tar
tcsh
tempfile
touch
true
umount
uname
uncompress
vdir
zcat
zcmp
zdiff
zegrep
zfgrep
zforce
zgrep
zless
zmore
znew
zsh
zsh4
And the list goes on. One HELL of a ferris wheel.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Does this mean that you have to wait for your files to get back down to the bottom to be able to read them???
No, I didn't RTFA, and I'm sure I'll get modded Offtopic, but the thought occurs to me:
Why are we, the free software community, busting ass to integrate pseudo-3d technologies to the desktop (AA-fonts, SVG-icons, real alpha blending), while it seems obvious that the next step is going to be a fully 3d-enabled desktop, with 3d icons placed in the current 2d-metaphor? Already new computers with new accellerators can push so many polys that the overhead is not measurable by users.
Browsing your pr0n collection will never be what it used to be again.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
This looks really cool. Anyone know if it can be downloaded so we can take it for a test drive? Please post a download link if you have one. The article doesn't provide any links except to a static image of how the program visually organizes the files.
Rather than having a software layer which groups files by content rather than tree structure, why not impliment a SQL type of system to access ReiserFS after all it is a database underneeth.
Doing this through the filesystem strikes me as alot more efficient than a quick hack of a filemanager.
Even Microsoft are working on a file system based
There is no god
I'd have enough trouble interpreting that render (in the article) if it were made of real objects floating in front of me, but a 2D projection of it would just be hell.
It seems to me that the claim they make about the relationships not being displayable in 2D is false; the parent/child relationships are easy, and we've already got that sorted. The "related by some arbitrary, unspecified characteristic" (grey and yellow folders) can be represented by another pane in the 2D browser for "Things that are related to this elsewhere", which Windows XP already does for lots of its "special folders" as a substitute for actually putting them in a sensible heirarchy in the first place.
Some people have wondered in the past "What happened to the 3-D GUIs that were promised to us in the past from movies like 'Jurassic Park'?" Well, here it is. But really, what are the advantages of this system that cannot be offered by a 2-D GUI? It's really cool and all, but don't you think this would be a slight waste of CPU or GPU power?
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Kewl...it won the prize.
No use to post till you see it.
...They use 3D file system technology like this to run big theme parks. I know for a fact they use something similar to this over at Jurassic Park. :)
:q!
If you are on OS X and would like to sample 3D navigation of disk drive content, there is a nice free project that does this, aptly named 3DOSX.
It uses Open GL to make the file system into 3D rotatable platters, and the platters are linked together. Can swim around the platters looking at the different documents.
Some screenshots are here:
3DOSX Screenshots
The project homepage is here:
3DOSX Homepage
It is an interesting look into alternative ways of doing things.
-----
Cast a Cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by
--W.B. Yeats' gravestone
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
When it is an opensource product , it is bad manners not to give a bittorent link with a story posting. while Ican't do that either , here is an actual download page ... Kinda slow
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
This is more pretty-printing than real innovation. They claim to arrange data by relation but the thing still knows active folders, parent folders and subfolders. And the color scheme (subfolders are blue) focuses on the hierarchical structure of the folders and not the relation of the data. So they took one way of organizing and presenting files that works for most people most of the time but has a few big shortcomings, pretty-printed it in a somewhat confusing way and added relational sugar that can only add to the confusion.
Pretty, but not impressive.
Wait a minute.. Where are screenshots? How about a link to the project? I remember reading about 3D interfaces, getting excited, then seeing them and thinking 'oh crud'. I'd like to see the 'award winning' one, please.
Screenshots for above project are here:
Updated screenshots link
One problem with this type of arrangement is that it requires thoughtful meta-description of all content (which scientists do but PHBs don't). What you have an interesting way of representing "degrees of separation", not a "triumph of Linux on the Desktop." The challenge ( http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/events/sevc/overview.htm ) was:
"This new international contest is designed to recognize outstanding achievements by scientists and engineers in the use of visual media to promote understanding of research results."
So for the visual representation of linked data structure, sure this looks great. As a GUI, heck no. "File Manager" seems like a misnomer here.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Check out FSN, an old 3D file navigator for IRIX.
(As paraphrased from "Jurassic Park": "I know this! This is a Unix system!".)
http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html
i want to give this a go, can i download it , no links to official site or anything
In Mac OS X you can set the dock to magnify the programs your mouse is over.
:-) The fact that list view has been here for so long should say something. People like lists where everything looks the same. Having things pop up from unreadable sizes out of nowhere seems a little unnatural.
This is how I am guessing this new 3D navigation works, by magnifying as you move around.
I turned my dock's magnification off.
I am inclined to say that the revolutionary idea that will change how we look at our computer desktop has not yet come.
tilTrue.info contechtext.info prettypowerful.info twitter.com/frets fb.com/prosody
How is this easier to use than this?
I'm already storing data by topic. I use a concept commonly called "directories". For example, all my pr0n is held in the ~/pr0n directory all my tunes are held in the ~/Tunes directory and all my pictures are held in the ~/Pictures directory.
I haven't looked at data based on physical location in eons. I used to read data sector by sector off floppy drives. Yeah, that did suck. Data wasn't necessarily organized by topic. But since the advent of filesystems, I've been able to organize by topic through use of these so-called "directories".
Does this look like a souped up ring interface from the classic Secret of Mana published by Square-Enix (nee Square)?
It does to me...
It looks neat, doesn't it? Unfortunately it looks unusable too. Big deal.
--- How to use Slashdot
i don't see the big hubbub... this is an illustration prize. no one said this is a useful or even remotely useable filemanager. The screen snapshot the team submitted from the program is "visually striking," says panel of judges member Boyce Rensberger. the judging was on how their screenshot looked as far as i can tell. the runners up were a watercolor painting of a macrophage and the cover of a book. whoopee, a pretty filemanager.
I run OpenBox to avoid the overhead of KDE or GNOME, as well as for its better interface.
If a 3d interface is begun, it won't be an openbox/blackbox style system in which one can quickly and easily do what's needed after learning the controls. It will be a feature-barren, "dumbed down" interface like KDE or GNOME that for all intents an purposes is designed to look like winshit.
I have nothing against KDE and GNOME, they show how beautiful X can be and help entice new users. We already have 3d in the sense of virtual desktops, and 3d graphics are irrelevant in comparison.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The trash bin.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
3Dwm is the most promising to really alterate our human-computer interaction.
Less is more !
Very interesting. But I think that 3D OS management apps peaked with that mod where you could kill your processes by shooting them in Doom. Nothing since has even close...
Rolodex.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/301/563 9/1476
M.
-kgj
is what is a realistic expectation for when this could be usefully integrated with Mad Hatter from Sun (or croquet) and with a database filesystem (which I think is something Reiser is working on). I would LOVE to test to test out a 3D filesystem and 3D desktop environment and it sounds as if the pieces required are starting to reach usable development positions. If someone were to get them integrated together, we truely would have an instance of Linux leapfrogging MS in the Desktop environment.
I do security
It seemed to draw massive CPU, but here it is. Note that the reason it wasn't so responsive was because I was compiling openoffice-ximian in the background. And I was running the XFree nvidia driver, instead of their proprietary... Maybe you'll have better luck.
/ in nolab/3dfm-1.0.tar.gz
1 573
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sf/subcat/in
Credits to: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=78355&cid=695
Can you get binaries or source code for this? Does anyone know?
Anyone remember the 7 year old kid grabbing the joystick looking at some 3D file manager like thingy in Jurassic Park I. Made me laugh and weap at the same time.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
But, hey, there is always buttonfly :) !!
I think you can actually rotate the structure, zoom in & zoom out. Homeworld the space sim has a similar interface that works very intuitively after a few tries. While each eye doesnt get the same picture the rendering of the picture follows the rules of 3d space.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Yes....
The data is arranged by its relationship with its content, rather than by its physical position on a hard drive or its file system.
Well...
*****DUH!!*****
Please, dont mod this up..ppl get so aggravated
http://fsv.sourceforge.net/ Or,try tdfsb http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/~leander/TDFSB/ Now, just set the default directory to your home directory and order the files there by content. Presto!
My Systems
http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/~leander/TDFSB// orbis.sourceforge.net/
http:/
One of the few 3d interfaces I love to use is the Homeworld / Homeworld2 interface for rotating and zooming in space.
The build & research manager in Homeworld is 2d though.
For most types of data representations the 2d tree interface is ideal. Maybe we are far too used to it; we don't now really see what we can do with a 3d interface that we can't do just as efficiently as in 2d. Even in a lot of movies 3d is just an enhanced use of 2d displays.
What we do most is deal with text. Text is very typically a 2d thing because its on paper or a representation of paper (slashdot textarea box). Text in 3d space... doesnt make sense. We'd have to learn a language of 3d space to understand references. Once we learn such a language it might be extremely efficient though, I guess time will tell.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
It's beautiful!
3dfm
"Written by students at a German university, this manual outlines the structure of the Linux kernel, file system, device drivers, networks, modules, and memory model. The CD-ROM contains the Linux kernel 2.4.4. Originally published in German, the second English edition was titled Linux kernel internals. The third edition applies to version 2.4 of Linux.Book News, Inc.(R), Portland, OR " - Amazon
--Your Friendly Neighborhood Product Placement Troll
This won because its apparently something new? hardly. I've been seeing 3D environments just like this for the last 15 years.
Even apples HotSauce did this which not only worked for File systems but also following how websites are interconnected through their links.
Maybe it just got noticed because its new, but theres nothing original about it.
Hee hee hee, they're playing right into my hands. Now to contact my lawyers and have them finish my patent for filesystems based on carnival rides. I just need to figure out how to initiate the shutdown process using less than ten balls...
I'm not sure about the "ferris wheel", but a lot of "3d" representations could be done in 2d, e.g. showing lines between folders and scaling according to focus or size of folders/ files...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
fsv.sourceforge.net Almost identical program, but open-source and for Linux. Now if only there was a way to run apps with it...
My Systems
Check the header, it says you posted with Internet Explorer.
Data has to first be organized in a meaningful way; how it is displayed -- 3D, 2D, a list, ... -- is output not content. Get angry; In 0.21 seconds Google! can find just about anything on the planet, yet the local network or the computer in front of you may take hours of effort and asking people to pull out the one important detail you need at the moment. Personally, I've spent months attempting to get basic documentation on systems I'm working on...not because it doesn't exist, but because nobody knows where it is!
Here are five ways to organize and retrieve data using computers;
Right now, file systems are handled by manual and basic search tools. (Minor frustration: Why doesn't Windows by default have something like the unix-style 'find -amin or -cmin'? Is it the tools or the file system?)
The next step should be system-wide VFolders and unlimited Ad-hoc queries. To be truely valuable, the results should show up as real and potentially persistant objects not as fake tool-specific or GUI-only results.
Unfortunately, in the name of 'ease of use' the Automatic structure that is tool-specific will probably become dominate in both Windows and MacOS...leading to more data being ignored and eventually lost.
Gnome and KDE developers are moving in the right direction with virtual file systems (VFS, ioslave) though the device concept is specific to the UI or the supporting libraries and has no reality at the file or device level.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
The "amusement park" interface metaphor could really be taken places if you start expaning your thinking! Why not a "log flume" like interface? Or themed versions, like "Pirates of the Carribean"? Or for true filesystem navigation thrills, roller-coaster interfaces: the Revolution! Shockwave! The Viper! Superman Ultimate Flight!
Tweet, tweet.
You can have a black stallion.
You have a typo in the link, (extra space between in and nolab). Thanks for the link, I am going to try it now.
n nolab/3dfm-1.0.tar.gz
Thanks again!
Here is a link without the extra space http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sf/subcat/in/i
it's a little off topic, but i remember watching something on cable about how interpol was using a computer program to map out the relationship within organized crime. what was interesting was that the map was a similar ferris wheel shape, and seemingly unrelated crime activities recorded a in conventional paper trail was shown to have strong ties when mapped in a ferris wheel chart.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
I don't see what this has to do with Linux,
exactly. I'm betting that this file manager
compiles and runs on BSD, Solaris, AIX, and
HP-UX. Maybe I missed someting.
Slashcode turns links without the anchor tag into broken links by inserting extra whitespace...
I really fail to see the usefulness of 3D file managers or 3D desktops or whatever.
None of those I tried were ever useful, but again, maybe this one will be different, though that snapshot put me off immediately.
I guess they look cool, untill you actually use them, and having used similar things, that snapshot was a no no for me.
Until 3D gives substantial usability improvements why 3D? In the real world, we use a "3D area" for spatial organization and co-location of like things. For example, we don't go grab a kitchen knife from the garage, but rather keep a knife at most 3 seconds from the cutter board. Also when we perform a task like fixing the leak in the washroom, we don't run to the garage for every tool we need, but bring along a 'tool box'.
I'm rambling now, but I guess what I'm trying to get at is that common tasks needs tools that are co-located, but at the same time you need a higher level organization for desperate unrelated tasks that you don't need to think twice before using.
So tying this back to computers, 3D was only a means of spatial organization. Mostly, things in a house are organized according to rooms, cabinets, drawers, shelves, etc. Now when you enter the computer land, the highest level organization we have is "Folders" organized in a tree-like fashion. And this tree is very complex as it contains all the items no one(i.e. tool-oriented person) gives a fuck about like OS directories, Program directories, configuration directories, etc. ALONG with the stuff that matters to us - OUR STUFF.
This is why content-based relationships in documents is the Next Big Thing, which is why Windows longhorn and Gnome experimental projects like Dashboard and its new database filesystem are being developed as we speak.
Actually I consider *NIX OSes the innovating the use of a "home" directory for each user as it was a common location for all of a users stuff. Windows didn't have such a directory for common folks until Windows XP(well there was My Documents in Windows 9x but it was global for all users). But its lacking now as many unix apps don't take co-location to a next level and build relationships between different documents and applications.
Am I the only person who looked at that screenshot and thought it looked like the old style Rolodex card holders?
A 2D interface is just fine as long as we are simply projecting it onto a 2D surface. Until interfaces become truly 3D, where we can see clearly the relationships, and likely input devices change as well, There won't be a really usable 3D interface.
Xerox had a spoke like concept several years ago. Can't remember what its called but I'm sure someone can find it.
I seem to remember one in the news quite a while back that had a wheel effect like this but I could never find it afterward. It was pretty cool. When you clicked on a directory it would spin open and you could choose from files in it. It was like a layered wheel within a wheel sort of idea. Anytone know here this could be found?
I never use file-managers. Recently I installed Namazu (www.namazu.org), a local search engine for my harddisk. Now I can google around in my own files. It gets updated every day.
That's the fastest way for me to find important (and not so important) things.
Since I am not so well organized and I am just too lazy to sort all data before saving, a search engine is optimal. So the computer can do what it is designed for (dull searching jobs) and I save tons of time.
EW
Duh
"PARC develops a unique approach to the visualization of information that uses people's perceptual and cognitive capacities to help them deal with large amounts of information. The approach is used in 3-D Rooms and is an integral technique used in the Xerox product Visual Recall. It results in the invention of the hyperbolic browser and other focus-plus-context visualization techniques that give the user three-dimensional views of text databases. These visualization techniques offer a revolutionary way for people to access information on the Internet and will later result in the formation of a PARC spin out, Inxight Software, Inc."
And, another description:
"Xerox spins out Microlytics to commercialize PARC's early compression technology research by bringing artificial intelligence spell-checking software, linguistic and data compression technologies to market. Based on an understanding of the deep structure and mathematical properties of language, linguistic compression technology is used for visual recall, intelligent retrieval and data compression. This work has a major impact on the automatic processing of language structures and is one of the key research areas underpinning Xerox's multilingual suite of products."
You can find the history here.
Here's a brochure
= 9J =
to search through my pr0n collection ...
Here's a demo.
Jesus fscking Christ. Now I suffer from eyestrain when working, in a couple of years I'll be seasick.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
CubicEye dogg.
As my cthonic(yet loving) wife often tells me, "Hey, -widgetx- is in the null-space accessed through a shimmering rift next to the Nth pan-dimensional eddy across from the lobed nodulus of Quron."
I should be used to such amphormous replies but even with those concise instructions I'm as visually imparied by the wonderous layering of semi-solid and even obdurite objects in a visual world as any meat-monkey. Worse yet, unless there's some squirt of delicious abject horror from the object once I've cast my withering stare upon it, how am I going to pick it out of the mess? How would visualizing my otherwise concise access to stupid digital objects make my life easier? Intuitively I know the answer, it won't. Most computer users look at the whole visual 3d-paradigm file-system as the close cousin to "AI" that it is. I applaud such wise beings.
Why anyone would want to visit some visual strucutre cluttered with the noise of everything including their target when they're looking for something like a script, "userthwack.pl", that's easily found by typing
userth[TAB]
in the appropriate folder at the command-line eludes me. Even the seething greed masters of Microsoft have begun their quest to sieze the glory of tab completion. What the image in the article reminds me of is an interface in some filthy Microsoft development package that presented circular tree diagrams that you could grab and sworl around. It was fun, but ultimately useless.
Humanity is just smart enough to know when something works and stupid enough to think they need to twist that into something "visual" when it shouldn't be. The command-line requires the user to bring something to the table, namely a brain and some knowledge on how to use the available tools. We need to appreciate and value the knowledge we have as users and we should rail against anyone or anything determined to make us nothing more than button-monkeys. Yes, most of userspace is populated by eye-cattle button-monkeys, but that doesn't mean I want to be treated like that.
When the machines are sophisticated enough to perform complex bio-electro-chemical analysis combined with adaptive filters that genetically shape their responses to the user in some kind of B.F.Skinner "wet-dream" of a causal negative-feedback loop associativity so that as a user approaches the machine the computer can seamlesly deliver exactly what the user wants (Porn, online-store, report a thought-criminal,share something) to do then a visual file-system is exactly what we should have.
Until that day, the intelligent computer user will enjoy the command-line and fall-back to a GUI when it's the only offered means, and the veal will let their corporate masters mold and shape them into the banner-add pop-up eye-cattle button-monkeys they deserve to be.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Is a combined technique.
/etc/X11 and /usr/X11R6/etc), both rings would rotate in opposite directions. :-)
1) Directories are arranged in rings (with files "further" away from the selector closer together and smaller, which coalese to "..." at the extreme opposite end)
2) Opening a directory pushes it's parent to the background and rotates it off to the side. The new folder appears as a new, centered ring on the screen. Parent folders are recursively behind it, and fade to black near the back end (fog).
3) If you pushd, the ring changes color, becomes more transparent, and locks into place. Then you can navigate away from it, and still see it. Perahps the camera angle changes to give you a better view of all pushd'd dirs. Popd brings that old ring into focus.
4) files that are linked from multiple directories are "locked", that is if both directories are visible (because of stack traversal, or a "sticky" navigation mode), they rearrange their positions until the file itself is superimposed in the Z direction. If you rotate a directory and get another file like that, the other rings rotate to accomodate it. In a directory where files are linked to from multiple places (think
5) Use a gamepad to navigate. Like Seiken Densetsu 2. (SoM).
6) Have attribute navigation modes, where the Z-index lockups are not inode linkages from the directories that contain them, but some other relationship, like document files sharing the same author or UserID. The motion of the rings in the background would provide visual feedback of how "important" that attribute is with respect to other collection of files. Perhaps all the matching entries "glow", and the background rings all try to center the concentration of matching entries along the Z axis.
The point is, a hub-and-spoke connection model needs to be exploited to provide visual information a user using a 2-d browser can't pick up otherwise. By having multiple layers that fade into the background, using background hilighting and motion to provide relationship information with objects being examined in the current directory is clearly an untackled angle.
I would personally love to see a file browser that worked like that. First things first: getting ext2 exteneded attributes supported by common Linux distros out of the box Otherwise that sort of browser is practically useless.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
It's not the 3D representation that's important. The program shows relationships between the content of the files. It's a file manager that looks on the content of the files. So it's a file manager at a higher integration level.
It's not important, if future desktops will use 3D representation. The integration of the data matters. Dashboard might be a glimpse from the future. It gives you additional information to your current working task. E.g. when you are chatting it show you information associated to yout chatting partner.
This kind of integration between applications might be a key feature of future dektops.
Don't bring E17 here - it won't be finished before Hurd is done.
Less is more !
screenshots and demo / get?
A blog I run for the wealth
it's not feature bloat that's the problem. It's clutzy interfaces. Why have a graphical pager when you can easily scroll virtual desktops with the mouse wheel? Icons are just crap, I spend way more time looking for the right icon on a two dimensional desktop than in a nice hierarchical menu. It would be even worse if I had to locate things in 3 dimensions instead of just 2.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
then we could use a three-dimensional interface.
The point of 2D is that you can see all of your viewing area at once, without stuff getting in the way, and you can interact with anything in your view, again without stuff getting in the way.
There's a reason we play two-dimensional board games, and things like 3D Chess end up being simply awkward novelties.
As 3D beings, we would have less control over a 3D system than we do over a 2D one.
And then we come to this piece of crap interface which is getting an award for some reason. They could have put lists of "related files" (not like those are going to be useful; who ever navigated by the "What's Related" menu in Netscape anyway?) in a 2D list, and it would have been more functional than this big huge ferris wheel displayed on a 2D screen where most of the things end up being so far away that they're a couple of pixels in area.
An interface in the physical meaning (the surface that divides two regions of space with different properties) can't possibly be 3D. An interface in the computer meaning, one between human space and information space, shouldn't be 3D either.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
mod parent up please
the project is apparently hosted at http://sourceforge.net/projects/innolab
I prefer something that uses my filesystems native tree format liky Inxight's Hyperbolic tree viewer. This gives many of the advantages of a 3D viewer without totally changing the relationship between files.
p.s. for some reason the demo wouldn't run under Mozilla despite the fact that I know I have the Sun JRE installed correctly. Worked fine under IE6 =( Even worse I know it used to run under Mozilla or else I never would have found it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Until we have fully 3-dimensional, floating holographic projectors instead of 2-dimensional displays, I fail to see how this really is any better than current methods. Hell, it'd be more intuitive to do this from a 2-dimensional, top-down rendering.
If you're drooling over this because you saw Hackers or Jurassic Park, you can stop now. Because just like the movies, a 3D interface to any file system is only eye candy.
Once we have the technology to accomodate 3D holographic projection on the level of a Star Trek holodeck, then maybe... and I mean maybe... a 3D interface for a file system might be more useful than our current methods. But until then, there is no need for it.
8==8 Bones 8==8
3dfm-1.0.tar.gz.torrent
This reminds me of a story a few years back.
I was at SIGGRAPH and I came upon this rack of computing equipment, along with a miniature rope bridge. Users were stapped on a VR helmet and they were standing on this minature rope-suspension bridge that was about six inches off the ground.
I approached the booth, noting the obvious millions of dollars in grant money that probably went towards this project and the computing equipment and power.
I asked, "What is this for?"
The guy replies that it's a VR simulator for people who have a fear of heights. They put the helmet on and step on this fake bridge and the VR simulates them standing on a bridge over a deep chasm.
So I tried the device and the graphics and response were so lame all it did was make me queasy. The developers proudly announced they had another version for people who have a fear of elevators and pointed to a small step-type platform. I told the guy, "I have a fear of being gang-raped by a bus full of gorgeous female college cheerleaders. Do you have anything for me?" He shrugged.
I inquired how they actually thought this would make money given the huge disparity between the cost of the project and the market it addressed.
Sometimes research is just public-funded masturbation.
You can download the source code from http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/opsys/linux/sf/subcat/in/in nolab/3dfm-1.0.tar.gz
Be aware that there are some library checks left out of the configure.ac that will prevent ./configure from finding all the library dependencies. To fix this, add the following lines in configure.ac in the library check section, to wit:
Then run "autoconf" to update the ./configure, and proceed as usual.
Hahaha!! This is hilarious! I saw this being developed! It was done by a group of undergrad seniors in Boston University's ECE department as their Senior Design project. I actually worked at the bench across from them. It won the "best project" award in senior design this past spring.
/. front page though!
Anyway, I never liked it. Firstly because it doesn't do anything. Unless they've done some major work since graduation, it doesn't allow you to actually manipulate files in any way whatsoever. Its strictly read-only. Second I couldn't see how it would possibly improve efficiency. I mean, the only advantage it would seem to have over 2D is that you can see more of the tree, but nothing's labelled (and its not practical to label all those folders, the screen would be covered with text), so you really can't get any useful information out of it. Additionally, they don't show it in the picture, but when names do come up they're at the bottom of the screen (if I remember right) and pretty dissociated from the folder they're supposed to represent. In short, while its kinda neat looking, and the group worked their asses off on it (its a lot of code), I don't think the program is viable in concept or implementation.
Its cool that they got on the
It just so happens that I know the guys that developed this program. It doesn't do anything relational at all. It just displays the folders in a 3D web. You can see from the picture on the awards page that there aren't any files anywhere to be seen, it's just folders. Files don't even show up until you click on a folder, then it's just a list of them.
Worst of all, you can't launch a program or open a file, it's strickly for visualization purposes.
I don't know about you, but I don't plan to spend a lot of time "looking" at my file structure just for the heck of it.
A 1d desktop is to have all your files and apps arranged linearly. You can do it by clearing you desktop and putting everything in your start menu. (no folders allowed. just scrolling)
A 4d or higher desktop could be as simple as a 2d desktop which allows you to rotate your view in more ways than 2... like ted nelson's zipperlists
Let a second processor take care of the rendering. (Firewire being too slow. If you can only read at 50 billion letters a second, feel free to use such antiquated technology.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Data are...
Damn it, man!
When we have full VR environments, an interface like that would be very cool and useful, but it seems to me, when we try to break out of the windowed paradigm, things begin to get more complicated than useful. Of course, at the point when we have VR, I am not sure a ferris wheel style would be quite as useful as a concept of rooms, or something of that sort.
Tricks of the 3D Game Programming Gurus
Tried to search the innolab 3D file manager thingy, but couldn't find it.
Where can I download the thing to try it out ?
Anyone knows ?
Thanks !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
jesus christ, that's about the most piddleshit gayest thing I've ever seen. Let me know when you want to actually get anything DONE with your computer. What a waste of time.
Yes you can at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/innolab/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/innolab/
There was a text input system that worked in a similar fashion.