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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.
I know this!
The last time I tried to expose *my* 3D user interface, I was escorted to the nearest holding facility for psychological review. /zing
I've tried out SphereXP and I have to say it's pretty kludgy. It bogged my machine down quite a bit, and just seemed rather counter intuitive. The idea of "parking" a window somewhere, and not being able to interact with it unless you restore it seemed to be a pretty big limitation to me.
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.
And why should they be? Adding a third dimension adds an order of complexity to the interface. The challenge of user interface design is to make things simpler.
Project Looking Glass
This was demo'ed at JavaOne this year, and really had some catchy visual features. Window contents can be saved to a backing pixmap and then applied to (wrapped around) objects of any shape.
Windows could be rotated (for example, post-its or config info was stuck to the back of a flat window in several cases)
This is still in the prototype stage, but the developer's release is open-sourced and available at java.net.
Subscribers can see articles in the future? So what? Everyone gets to see them in the future.
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.
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"
depends on what web site you're accessing...
> this will improve anyone's computing experience in any way.
That's ridiculous. Let's talke real 3D, glasses and all. This would completely change everything and for the better. Putting things in a real background, 3D video, parking windows, 3D representations of CD cases instead of ID3 tags, 3D website deisgn, remote control of real world objects, etc.
>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. Some of us buy our CPUs to use them, not coddle them.
Then again 640k is enough, eh??
Forth understand hard not is!