A solely 3D desktop would become a serious drain on my patience, I'm afraid. While it may be *fun* to navigate through your desktop in 3D, you would run into some impediments that would prevent many users from being able to make practical use of it. Making it so you could alternate quickly between a useful 2D interface and an enjoyable 3D one I should think would be an acceptable compromise.
I won't go into detail on where I feel it would not only be useless, but would also hamper many procedures, such as in word processing and image editing applications. The reasoning is too obvious, and I'd just be passing out hairnets to the bald, so to speak.
I would however like to explore its uses on a topical basis, where a direct metaphor relation would be a boon, rather than a burden. Factory management, building security, and online shopping are a few fine examples where direct metaphor in a 3D workspace would be welcome. Virtual environments where people can interact with eachother could be interesting, although the capacity for misleading would be increased in parallel with the capacity for representing yourself more accurately.
To wit, I believe that while 3D environments have their place, their value as an interface between user and desktop pc should not be grasped at simply for the sake of novelty. Perhaps in time, through further developments in advanced workspace metaphors, and the inexorable advances in 3D accelerated display adapters and such, I will be obliged to eat those words. I just don't see the prominent elements of the two dimensional desktop metaphor becoming obsolete anytime soon.
The digital entertainment developer market is different now. For one thing, it's quite a bit larger, and far more diverse. Now is also the ideal time for Sony to stick their foot in the door, with the trip-ups recently by SGI and Intergraph. As an artist at a game company, this really is something that piques my interest, as software has always had trouble keeping up with hardware, mostly due to developers simply not having solid hardware from the respective companies to work with before it gets shipped. So you see a new 3D accelerator come out with all these shiny new features, and don't see any products that take advantage of it for at least a few months, when lo and behold, the hardware developer announces their next big thing. I appreciate the progress, but it's a stagger-step way to do things. Sounds like Sony plans to improve on the model greatly by giving developers access to the new hardware in time to give them a chance to release products using concurrent technology. This, I look forward to.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't go into detail on where I feel it would not only be useless, but would also hamper many procedures, such as in word processing and image editing applications. The reasoning is too obvious, and I'd just be passing out hairnets to the bald, so to speak.
I would however like to explore its uses on a topical basis, where a direct metaphor relation would be a boon, rather than a burden. Factory management, building security, and online shopping are a few fine examples where direct metaphor in a 3D workspace would be welcome. Virtual environments where people can interact with eachother could be interesting, although the capacity for misleading would be increased in parallel with the capacity for representing yourself more accurately.
To wit, I believe that while 3D environments have their place, their value as an interface between user and desktop pc should not be grasped at simply for the sake of novelty. Perhaps in time, through further developments in advanced workspace metaphors, and the inexorable advances in 3D accelerated display adapters and such, I will be obliged to eat those words. I just don't see the prominent elements of the two dimensional desktop metaphor becoming obsolete anytime soon.
The digital entertainment developer market is different now. For one thing, it's quite a bit larger, and far more diverse. Now is also the ideal time for Sony to stick their foot in the door, with the trip-ups recently by SGI and Intergraph. As an artist at a game company, this really is something that piques my interest, as software has always had trouble keeping up with hardware, mostly due to developers simply not having solid hardware from the respective companies to work with before it gets shipped. So you see a new 3D accelerator come out with all these shiny new features, and don't see any products that take advantage of it for at least a few months, when lo and behold, the hardware developer announces their next big thing. I appreciate the progress, but it's a stagger-step way to do things. Sounds like Sony plans to improve on the model greatly by giving developers access to the new hardware in time to give them a chance to release products using concurrent technology. This, I look forward to.