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3D User Interfaces
The book contains 13 chapters, divided into five parts. The first part contains two short chapters that introduce the basic concepts of 3D user interfaces, give a bit of history of 3D UIs, and define the scope of the book.
The second part discusses hardware input and output devices that are useful when developing 3D user interfaces. The first chapter in this part is on output devices and it presents various visual and auditory displays. Haptic devices are also discussed in this chapter. The following chapter presents 2D and 3D input devices that can be used with 3D user interfaces. The devices discussed include not only the classics, such as 2D mice, keyboards, and joysticks, but also 3D mice, tracking devices, and various forms of direct human input, such as via speech or via bioelectric signals.
The third and largest part of the book is on 3D interaction techniques. The first chapter of this part discusses the various ways that have been devised in the past to perform 3D selection and manipulation of objects. A vast number of techniques are presented in this chapter, from various pointing and virtual hand techniques to widgets for rotating an object. The following chapters discuss techniques to allow navigation through virtual worlds and user interfaces, in particular techniques for traveling and pathfinding. The following chapter is on system control and it discusses how to control the system via commands, such as using graphical menus, voice and gestural commands, or real-world tools. Finally, this part of the book contains a chapter on symbolic input, i.e. communicating text or numbers to the system, in the context of 3D UIs.
Part four of the book deals with designing and developing 3D user interfaces. For me, this was the most interesting part of the book because it shows how to put together the various input/output devices and interaction techniques presented in the previous chapters. This part also contains a chapter on evaluation of the design and implementation of user interfaces, an important aspect in order to ensure the usability of a user interface.
In the book's final section, the author takes a look at the future of 3D user interfaces with a focus on the combination of the virtual world with the real world -- so-called augmented or mixed reality. This area has received quite a bit of attention from academic research in recent years.
Throughout the book, there are useful guidelines on designing usable user interfaces. Following these guidelines will probably not give you a perfect 3D user interface, but it will definitely help you avoid the common mistakes and pitfalls. It would have been nice if all the guidelines in the book had been put all together in a separate appendix in addition to having them spread out all over the book.
The book also has a number of images and illustrations. The figures throughout the book are in black and white, apart from a four-page color insert that depicts various hardware input and output devices.
This book contains a lot of information and is probably the most comprehensive book on 3D user interfaces I have seen to date. Pretty much every aspect of 3D UIs is covered in the book somewhere, with some topics being covered in more detail than others. If you're not familiar with 3D UIs at all, this book gives you an excellent introduction to this active field of research. If you are already somewhat familiar with the topic, this book offers you a comprehensive overview of the field and gives you many references to more detailed research articles and papers.
Martin Ecker has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 9 years and works as a games developer for arcade games. In his rare spare time he works on a graphics-related open source project called XEngine.
You can purchase 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Wake me up when they have the gear available that is being used in Minority Report : There seems to be more thought put into that than just to give Cruise a cool way to look for information.
Not quite a "real" 3D UI, it does have some cool effects for switching between virtual desktops. http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/
doesn't mention the 3D interface used in the first Jurassic Park
It probably doesn't since that was just a file system viewer and it was taken out of Irix. You can get lookalikes for linux though if you wanted to waste some CPU cycles looking for those porn images.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I am working on a 3D UI project, theres still a lot of work to do but I think it has potential. I'd love to get some feedback, positive and negative. I currently have a techdemo but I plan to have a virutal desktop expose like system sometime early next year.
I will probably buy this book just to see if if actually has any good ideas I can incorporate.
logiccubed.com
Jason
A while ago I wrote a 3d file browser for Linux. It's available here:
http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/3dfb/
It was a fun project and I wish I had the time to move on with it. I wanted to start adding support for textures and such, but alas school got in the way.
It was an interesting look into the 3d world. I still use it from time to time just to fly around my file system.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
the 3d interface from jurassic park actually exists and you can d/l it if you want, it never was completely finished though and is thoroughly dated by this point.
you can find it here
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I like to be INSIDE a 3dlevel when designing it. I haven't coded the technology, maybe never will, but the ability to 'dig' holes or 'raise' up the walls/floor, or place objects inside the level is CLEARLY SUPERIOR to 2d CAD level design.
God spoke to me.
The holographic computer interface was the coolest part of that movie. It really looked like a good way to process a lot of dense audiovisual data as quickly as possible. Too many movie computer systems look like nothing more than limited use expert systems with flashy graphics and cheesy sound.
Chances are that you run linux so download it from sourceforge originally it was developed on SGI and people posted links to that, the sourceforge version is probably more up to date. Enjoy, I tried it but didn't find it that useful. Reason is that the display is flat, i.e. 2D and twisting and turning in 3D using odd combinations of 3 mouse buttons and 3 keys (Ctrl,Alt,Shift ) just to open a folder is somehow too much work, a simple command line or double click works better.
In support of your argument, I have a box at home filled with consumer 3D controllers - there was a fad for special 3D joysticks, all of which seem to have fallen by the wayside.
A whole industry seemingly built around trying to help you gain better control of the craft in Descent. No more Descent - no more 3D controllers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some years (5 already?) ago I started developing a server and a 3D widget set based on Direct3D. I started with OpenGL, but found Direct3D more fully featured and a better fit for my goals at that time.
Applications shared the server to display their objects. All interprocess communication was COM. You could easily write a 3D app in Visual Basic.
Navigation between applications (or their components) was made easy by having each application offer a set of camera positions and orientations for the user to travel to (using the Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab conventions); but the user still could roam freely if he wanted.
Unfortunately my interest waned out before I could do anything really useful. I've still got a 3D piano keyboard object, controlled by an app playing midi...
While some say that a 3D UI doesn't add value, I think there is much to be discovered. Imagine programming in 3D, where each class and function is a labeled box which you can enter to see its code. If-then-else and case constructs could also be presented interestingly. Lame maybe - for now - but I believe that by leaving the linear one-dimensional text model we'll get a completely new perspective which we haven't grasped yet because of the lack of a useable and non-trivial framework to play with. It'll come.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
It's not an either-or situation: X can be made to look 3D.
I'd like an X window manager that let me grab the edge of a window and turn it, so it looked like it was facing to the left, right, up, or down, depending on which direction I turned it. You would still see the window, and it would still respond to events, but it would look compressed in the dimension you pushed it.
Another 3D-like effect would be to move "away" from a group of windows, as zooming out to 10,000 feet, so the group of running apps looked like an icon. You could have little clusters of apps running in various spots, some close, some far away. Think of it as a unified destop switcher. There are lots of possibilities there.
I'm better at the vision thing than the doing thing, unfortunately.
sigs, as if you care.
I had a good chance to play with Project Looking Glass at Linux Expo in London this year, and while I was certainly impressed, I realised that it's nothing more than a very very pretty extension of a standard KDE/Gnome-like desktop.
First off, you can shrink things down to the bottom of your window. This is basically a clone of the MacOS X dock. You can also shove things off to the left or right of your workspace, which is the same thing, but sideways. The impressive twist to this is that you can still see what the windows are doing when they are in this state, so if, for example, you have a movie playing, it will continue to play in it's docked state. Basically an up-to-date reworking of an existing concept.
Secondly, you can rotate n degrees clockwise or anti-clockwise to get a fresh workspace. Now bear in mind that the number of workspaces is finite, and you always rotate the same amount of space round, it's not an "analogue" rotation. So basically this is the concept of multiple desktops (as KDE and Gnome and various other WMs have had for years) but made much more pretty. The inclusion of a number of specially created "panoramic" desktop wallpapers help enhance the illusion.
You can't move windows along the Z axis, ie change their "depth" in space, nor can you travel vertically around your 3D environment (think Doom vs Quake here).
So basically, project looking glass is a very impressive, very pretty extension of your standard WM. There will be some next generation desktop features that will be taken from it, but noone's ever going to be able to *use* it.
Think of it as the latest Vivenne Westwood creation strolling down the Milan catwalk. Many of the years line in clothes will be based on elemnents of the design, but noone's ever going to wear it to a business meeting.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
I've seen a lot of projects take stab at 3D and many of them go about it in a very unnatural way.
SphereXP that someone mentioned earlier, for example, takes regular windows apps and has paper thin windows floating around arbitrarily in 3D. I mean, that just doesn't work. Then you have all these 3D file browsers that cram so many files into this vast 3D mess that unintelligble. You can't read the filenames because there's so much stuff in the way (usually other filenames, but sometimes representations of files or folders) and that's just not natural either.
And I'm not claiming to be an expert on 3D design. I don't know how you'd do a good 3D file browser off the top of my head, nor a 3D desktop. But I can definitely spot the ones that aren't remotely natural or intuitive.
Part of the reason windowed user interfaces work is because the paradigm of a "desktop" makes sense to users. And a desktop is flat. So is a window. So, if you want 3D UI to work, you need to come up with a 3D paradigm that seems natural to the user, and frankly, I just don't know what that paradigm would be.
The problem here is that our eyes are realy 2D sensors. The stereoscopic effect gives an estimation of the distance but all the information is still projected on a 2D plane. and the brain translates this to 3D information. You don't know what's behind an object until you walked around it. When you walked all around it, the brain has deduced all the 3D information from the 2D sensors (eyes) All visual information we recieve is 2D unless objects are half transparent. It doesn't make sense to use an 3D display unless we plug it directly into the brain.
It was FSN, and the machine was an SGI box, not a Quadra (even if it were, an X server could conceivably been used).
Futhermore, even though the scene was laughable it was not that far fetched. Remember she didn't say "this is a UNIX system because of the 3D file manager," presumably she identified it by the file system layout.
I mean really what does UNIX look like? What one thing has it ever looked like? OpenWindows, X, CDE, different shells. at all levels except the POSIX API and a bag of utilities and a somewhat standard file system layout, there is nothing visually distinguishing about "UNIX" (even if you restrict UNIX to a particular implementation like Solaris or IRIX).
The test of a true Unix weenie is that he/she is able to operate the system through all the customized/weird interface variations. I guess everyone is just intimidated by the JP chick.
I also think that a 3D UI would be awkward. A ZUI (Zooming User Interface), however, has proven to be a very efficient and friendly way to organize data on a computer. The infinite desktop model allows for spatial organization and quick navigation.
Jef Raskin always has interesting GUI ideas, as well as a ZUI Demo.
Here at UCSD, Jim Hollan and friends have produced a ZUI called Dynapad. The video on that site shows a bunch of photos on the desktop, but in general any file or process can be accessed and arranged in the same manner.
Zoom, zoom, zoom!
There are two types of people in this world: those that categorize other people and those that don't.
Let's talk real 3D, glasses and all. This would completely change everything and for the better.
...)
Yes, let's talk about this "better" world.
Putting things in a real background,
Okay in a real 3D, there is no "background", just like how there's no "background" in real life. There's just things that are farther away. The way you put things in the "background" is either by schlepping the window 5km away from where you're working, and then then return the 5km to your primary worksite. This method is incredibly annoying and inefficent.
Or you can perfom some action that moves automatically moves the window 5km, then perform some action that automatically retrieves the window from 5km away. How this is different from a 2d interface iconifying a window to a thumbnail, I don't know.
3D video,
Well all that requires is a 3d video player, not really a 3d interface, unless of course you're talking about fully immersive virtual reality, but I'm assuming your not.
parking windows,
I'm not familiar with parking windows.
3D representations of CD cases instead of ID3 tags,
Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.
Another example is all those media player skins that resemble radios, tubas, organ grinders, and what not. These are widely considered to be very poorly designed interfaces. Whatever intuitiveness is gained by modeling the interface to superficially resemble a real world device is lost the moment the user tries to use it. You can't twist dials easily with a mouse. It's much slower to click a series of button widgets, than press physical buttons. Compare onscreen keyboards to your physical keyboards.
Let's change your idea from id3 tags to cddb files, since id3tags are per track, and cd cases are per album. Right now I click "view info" and get a window that displays the tracklisting and possibly the album cover. With your idea I would click "view info" and magically the cd case would fly into view. I would then need to rotate the case to view the track listing, and then rotate it again to view the cover art. Presumably the case would be textured in high resolution scans of the physical cd's artwork. As anyone who has viewed the back cover art can attest, it's not always easily read (i.e. screwy fonts, text that spirals around the outside edge, tracks not always listed in order, etc.).
3D website deisgn
Of course websites are mostly text, an intrinsicly 2d object. So it's unclear on how you would actually add a third dimension to this. Sure you display one page, and then display outgoing pages farther away, but if you can't read them, then what's the point. You could achieve this same thing by displaying a thumbnail of the link's destination in a traditional 2d interface.
I think the thumbnail idea is alot more plausible than that Johnny Mnemonic crap.
remote control of real world objects
I'll give you this one if the device interacts in the world in 3d. So, a robot arm? Yes. A furnace? No.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all 3d are pure crap. I'm saying use them where appropriate (CAD, geospatial, some simulation, spreadsheets), and not where it's not (text, photographs, cd players,
>This is just another fantastic way to waste the CPU
So is anti-aliasing, so is even having a windowing system that isn't completely and utterly bare bones, etc.
Anti-aliasing isn't simply eyecandy. It enhances the user experience by making text easier to read. The easier it is read, the easier the user can perform his task.
Some of us buy our CPUs to use them, not coddle t
fsv is an interesting concept, but has one major failing: They assume that filesize has any meaning to the user, and that's getting it backwards.
The display size should indicate importance. Some of my most important files are pretty small, and some of my largest files aren't. For example, the backup directory would be huge, as would log and cache directories.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You might want to have a look at Ratpoison http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ as a WM. It is a Windowsmanager that basically maximizes every Window (tiling is possible AFAIK) and you can switch between them with the same keys you would use in "screen" (with a different prefix key of course). I use it as the final step of a constant descend KDE->XFCE->Fvwm->Ratpoison since I also use X only to give me more Xterms and for browsing, movies and pictures.
Linux is not Windows