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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.
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.
For an interactive system (the only place a file browser matters) the GPU is always completely available to service what you're looking at. It has no other function.
If you're not using it, it's just sitting there being a waste of space. The one valid point here, though, is that power consumption might be higher if you're using every bell and whistle.
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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.
i disagree. 3d is only a natural progression from 1d and then 2d. i guess you could consider the command line 1d, but that isn't a way of representing anything at all. so, why is 3d the natural next thing? data still isn't organized any better than it was before. in fact, since the amount of ways to arrange stuff in a 3d desktop is *so* much higher, it is much easier to lose stuff, just like in the real world. arguably, the desktop metaphor has problems, but going 3d won't really solve that.
plus, antialiasing has nothing to do with 3d. it is a pseudo-analog (vs. digital) not psuedo 3d technology; furthermore, alpha blending is just eye candy.
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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.
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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".
Probably because most people see the open source desktop as being some kind of cheap Windows rip off?
Personally I don't think 3D will be of much use until the input method is figured out. I certainly don't want to stick on gloves and wave my arms around to use a computer, far too much effort.
Anyway, we still write letters on flat paper, books are still 2D. What good will a 3D text file be? there are many limitations on what 3D applications will work. I think we'll just end up with a 3D desktop management system and nothing much else.
I would much rather have a desk where the whole surface is a screen, that's the sort of computer I can see being rather useful, especially do those working in a drawing office.
The biggest problem with a 3D desktop is that our input devices are still stuck in 2D.
Maybe it would take a 3D desktop to foster innovation in pointing devices, but most likely it will take both, at the same time. I'm waiting for the Minority Report style interface, with virtual keyboards, multiple desktops, and overexaggerated gestures. Add some weighted wristbands to the mix, and just maybe I'll get a good cardio workout while trolling Slashdot as well.
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.
It's really cool and all, but don't you think this would be a slight waste of CPU or GPU power?
That's got to be the stupidest comment I've ever heard. Why the hell do you people think that we could possibly "waste" CPU or GPU power??? What the hell did we put such powerful processors in these computers if we don't write software to use them?
In my opinion, it's about time someone writes some software that looks good and uses the full capabilites of the hardware we're running it on, all the while making the meaning of the data stored on them more coherent.
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Have you ever used a 3D desktop? Maybe all the 3D desktops on Windows (try shellcity.net for a few links) are just bad implementations, but they are a lot more cumbersome to use. Remember that it's better to be able to launch apps quickly than it is to fit a million icons on a screen.
One Windows 3D desktop I remember was like Quake. You'd walk around this map and launch apps on the wall. To focus an app, you walk up to the wall and hit an action button. Cool, but not practical.
Another was a sort of empty 3D area with floating icons and a ground as a reference point so you don't get lost. The floating icons were just cubes with the 2D icon textured on each side, but it was functional. The trouble was that you either ended up organizing all these 3D icons within your field of vision as if it was a 2D desktop or you wasted half your time turning around and flying towards whichever icon you wanted to click on.
Any 3D desktop that works will have to be extraordinarily revolutionary just to be useable.
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The philosophy of linux and unix-like OSs is to have small programs that do single tasks well, and link them together to do complex tasks. Changing how a program at the beginning of the chain can have profound implications to the rest of the chain, whereas changes to the end of a chain have little impact at all. Writing a file manager/browser application doesn't interfere with any other software. It is an application running on top of the OS. The filesystem, however is a fundamental part of the operating system. Writing a filesystem has the potential to break hundreds of programs, or even render the machine unusable.
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Why do you have to write code and documentation to be a member of the free software community? A few people willing to do some "tech support" (i.e. answering questions) on a free software project's mailing list or message board can be invaluable to the general public's satisfaction with the project. It allows the developers to focus their energies on development, while still providing some modicum of help to those who need it. Many people are citizens of the United States. A lot of them don't vote in elections. Does that make them not be a citizen? How about those who don't work in politics? Are they not citizens?
The Open source guys are targeting 1 ghz machines with a TNT video card, not a 2 ghz machine with a Geforce video card. That's okay, that's what the rest of the industry is doing to. It simply suprises me that they're not taking the opportunity to leapfrog a generation and go straight for something recently-produced computers are easily capable of.
Your above post is no less true if you replace "pseudo 3D" with "SVG". Which is my point really.
All these little "quality of life" improvements bought with so much developer time, seem just to be special cases of the ancient OpenGL 1.2 API. OpenGL uses the graphics hardware to its fullest. All these litte ad-hoc improvements we're making aren't necessarily doing that. When the general solution is (1) more efficient, (2) more general, and (3) will age better, I think it should be adopted!
anti-aliasing is not pseudo analog, it increases the effective resolution.
that is pseudo analog. analog would be infinite resolution!
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
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
Which makes me wonder.....do we even need a 3D desktop at this point? Why not let there be a 2D desktop projected into 3D space, and still enable the machine to display other apps in full 3D when necessary.
Just because a display has the ability to display true 3D objects (or simulated I guess) doesn't mean it should display EVERYTHING in 3D. A 2D desktop might be the most efficient design of a desktop, and maybe we should just leave it at that.
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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.
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The biggest problem with a 3D desktop is that our input devices are still stuck in 2D.
I've yet to see anything better than a plain old keyboard and mouse for navigating 3D worlds expertly.
There's a reason you don't see people playing quake with powergloves.