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.

Comments

Dock

[igabe]

In Mac OS X you can set the dock to magnify the programs your mouse is over.

This is how I am guessing this new 3D navigation works, by magnifying as you move around.

I turned my dock's magnification off. :-) 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.

I am inclined to say that the revolutionary idea that will change how we look at our computer desktop has not yet come.

uh, why the excitement?

[jpr1nd]

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.

Re:OT: 3d file manager

[digidave]

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.

Re:OT: 3d file manager

[dollargonzo]

anti-aliasing is not pseudo analog, it increases the effective resolution.

that is pseudo analog. analog would be infinite resolution!

Re:ls -R /

[Zeinfeld]

Since when did *any* O/S show files based on their physical location. Letssee I'll just go to cylinder 34, track 32, block 23 and pull up my pr0n...