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3D GUI Project 144

Posted by CmdrTaco from the why-waste-a-perfectly-good-dimension dept.
Qbertino writes: "A guy that calls himself "matrixnan" introduced this project on NANs Blender homepage. It's gonna be a GPLd 3D GUI for Linux using Blender as construction kit. Blender is a professional freeware 3D Animation/Modelling/Applicationkonstruction kit that features Python as Plugin language (Plugins are a big deal in the 3D business). Coding of the Project uses/will use Python, C and C++. Unlike the 3Dsia project it sticks more closely to the 3rd person perpective of the classical Desktop and avoids going to deep into VR and the acompanied problems. It uses NANs reference grade 3D construcion kit and seems to be on its way quite well - and thus will probably see usability quite soon. Also take a look at some serious eye candy - the screens." I'm a little more skeptical about time frames for actually being able to run this thing, but there are lots of interesting ideas to think about.
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3D GUI Project

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  • Perhaps the linux community can bridge this gap and push towards a standardized 3-d engine and even reinvigorate the gaming potential of linux.

    It's called CrystalSpace [linuxgames.com]
  • I have to agree. It seems that if the screenshots of the interface take over a minute to load, even with the connection I have at work (isn't the graveyard shift fun?), then it seems to me that it might be too graphics intensive for the vast majority of Linux users and their processors.

    Now, I hate the standard background (loathe would be a better word), so I tend to create graphics backgrounds in Bryce as a screen shot to have instead of any of the crap that came on the box. But it seems to me that if a whole new interface is going to be written it should satisfy the following requirements (which are not the only ones, just what I could think of):

    1) The interface should not interfere with the normal operations of the OS/computer it is hosted on.

    2) It should not require so much memory or processor cycles that Windows would be preferable.

    3) If it is some kind of animated "3-D" interface, it should know to turn itself off when the user starts to use any full screen apps. There is no point to waste processor time on something you are not looking at.

    4) It should look appealing. I don't care if you can animate a vomit cloud as an interface. I don't want it on my computer.

    5) It should be flexibly modifiable by the User. I.e., give the user some options for it as to colour schemes, animation speed, etc.

    Comments?

    Kierthos
  • Just a couple of days back the idea of Virtual Reality was put up to me and so I got down to doing some research on the topic. I located some sites that gave info on that and visited some sites listed as using VR but to my disappointment I found there were just normal pictures on the screen. I was a little baffled until now when I read comments from the readers, that there seems to be actually very little difference in the apppearance of VR photos. Well I have something to thank Slashdot for.
  • hehe.. that's pretty much what I was thinking! Now imagine that the characters represent files and when you click on them you can rightclick on the recyclebin and they walk over to it and do themselves in and their corpse falls there and rots for a few days. But if you decide that you want that file back you can grab a necromancer and perform a "wake dead" spell on it. Sound stupid? Now you know how I feel everytime I see people try to come up with "virtual reality" desktop interfaces. In a way you can see that it would be possible, but would it be efficient and usable? Not really.

  • You can minimize mouse movement by having pop-up rather than pull-down menus. In other words, when you press the 'menu' mouse button, the menu appears *in the current location* rather than at the top of the window or top of the screen. Most Windows apps have pop-up menus, but they're limited to context-sensitive stuff only. I'd prefer to have the whole menu bar accessible in this way, with an additional 'Context' item for operations on the thing you clicked on.
  • That looks like what sacrifice uses. Although, they provide spells that you can click on at the bottom left of the screen if you want to instead.
  • The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized.

    Actually, they got it almost right visually, but the interaction is completey wrong.

    The start bar buttons have an oh-so-small border beneath them which completely negates the usability benefit of placing an item on the edge of the screen. The buttons may look "cooler" with the one-pixel border around them, but they're not any easier to track than any other button on the screen.

  • there is no consistent paradigm for 3D interaction

    Your house maybe? Directories as rooms, files as objects with a shape suggesting the contents, desktops as floors ?

  • I think that a 3D interface would be really intuitive if it mimicked real life as closely as possible but removed the bottlenecks we have...distance for one.
    But distance is the most fundamental component of our perception of reality (arguably with competition from inertia). Take it away and what have you got? Limbo... Of course, you could take the Terry Pratchett approach: all places are one place, but it's a very big place.
  • Use the mouse to point to an object (i.e. a directory 'door' or a file ), just like aiming in a 3D game.
    Aargh! no!

    The game aiming model is, arguably, good for what it does -- which is select a direction. Picking an object with it would be very clumsy. You'd get much more accuracy using the "normal" mouse model (possibly rotating if the cursor is beought to the edge of the screen, or even better if ot's taken to the edge and the user keeps dragging).

    Mind you, I'm not suggesting that a general-purpose 3D UI is a good idea in the first place.

  • if you don't like it "Put the 'off' button on."
  • I imagine a real 3D Gui to be like the cyberspace as told about in William Gibson's books. That would be far more interesting.
    Interesting, yes. Practical? Hardly. Possibly more practical than the web if you have a direct neural interface.
  • Surely the modern desktop is everything stacked all on top of each other, while everything spread out is Windoze 1?
  • Oops - that should read "I think a 3d desktop is, by its very nature, inferior to a 2d one"
    (Sorry)
  • IMO, its not so much confusion, but overhead. If windows are always maximized I dont have to waste my time resizing windows.

    The desktop metaphor with a vwm that has multiple desktops that each can be scrolled through, with resizable apps is kind of cool -- especially if you have eye candy like nice wallpaper or something.

    Again, IMO, I'd rather focus on the application than waste my time doing window manager maintenance like resizing windows so that I can take the killer screenshot.

    Don't get me wrong, having something like a "wharf" in enlightenment, windowmaker and blackbox are extremely cool, especially if they contain applications that you gain information from frequently. It allows you to glance over and gain information without having to slide your mouse over somewhere a la the windows systray.
  • Thanks for the link!!! Good stuff.
  • These guys who are all trying to make 3DUI's are going the wrong way.. they're all trying to map 2D environments into 3D space which isn't a radical thing at all. I think that a 3D interface would be really intuitive if it mimicked real life as closely as possible but removed the bottlenecks we have...distance for one. A combination of a 3D environment with voice recognition might result in a totally new type of interface. For example .. whenever someone goes to the office he actually can walk around using a keyboard or mouse (or give a voice command to go to the office) (i think if a cheap 3d glove could be made available it'd be great)... he'd give a voice command to his secretary to send a letter which he would dictate....if he had to have a video conference he'd go to a conference hall in the virtual building and everyone's video would be displayed in the hall. 2D interfaces are intuitive enough for people familiar with computers particularly the younger generation (heck... a CUI is the best for us geeks) but if you look at senior citizens they are totally lost even in a GUI (at least my parents are... and their friends)
  • I read the page on 350 hits, skim through it and notice a hit counter.
    Refresh the page for the hell of it, and notice its jumped neary 1000 (thousand) hits in around 3-4 mins. Either 900 people just came through /. or a few dozen like me wondered repeatedly about the magnitude of the /. effect.
  • "For example, what are the 4 locations on the screen to which you can move the mouse very fast? The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized"

    Also a lot of potential for mishaps. *slide mouse* Oh shit, not again...

    There are lots of apps out there that use the four corners of your screen but they are mostly lame. The fix of course is to have the person wait in the corner for a fixed amount of time. But why? Just write the app to be in the windows systray and then click on it or something.

  • 3D projection onto a 2D screen... (Score:3)

    by mike260 ( 224212 ) on Thursday December 21, 2000 @01:06AM (#545628)
    ...is inherently ambiguous. Why ON EARTH would you want your work, your system files and so on represented so unreliably?

    Example: Try using 3DS-MAX for heavy-duty 3D polygonal modelling for a few hours. Now imagine that the undo stack is only a single level deep, and that each mistake you make has deleted a random file from your HDD. Now note that this is a package that's evolved through many years of design by a large team at a well-funded software house.
  • The couter said "60" last night. As I said: "Poor guy. 60 Hits and slashdotted allready."

  • Re:From the world of pointless GUI's (Score:5)

    by dennisp ( 66527 ) on Thursday December 21, 2000 @01:13AM (#545630)
    I know this isn't what you were talking about, but check out this [skinz.org] and this [skinz.org]. *Laugh*

  • This tickled the memory of the (formerly?) Apple project called "Hotsauce", which provided a fly-through, 3-D browsing environment for networked content. It ain't pretty, but then again, it ain't vapor. Yo ucan download a plugin:

    http://www.xspace.net/hotsauce/ [xspace.net]
  • Perhaps a bigger problem in this scenario is that of the menus within these windows. If they're not maximized, then to get to the menu in each window you have to click in a different location every time. This is very non-intuitive.

    Probably the only feature of the awful Mac GUI that I like is the application menu system. There is a permanent menu bar across the top of the screen, and it is used by whatever application is in the foreground at the time, whether or not it is maximized. I wonder if any X window managers offer that functionality.

    I'm sorry, but this just sounds ridiculous to me. User interfaces are pretty badly designed as it is, adding more mouse buttons doesn't solve anything. It just makes it worse.

    Requiring users to use more mouse buttons is a bad idea, but having more mouse buttons for those who want to use them is not. Chording systems, like the one used in the Oberon GUI, take a while to learn but are really handy once you've gotten used to them. And I've always wanted something like a high-end digitizer tablet puck for a mouse -- the standard buttons, plus a programmable keypad. In many cases, this would reduce the number of times I have to move my hand between the mouse and the keyboard.

    --



  • The previous "off topic" post is actually a negative comment on the project as a whole. I believe the person behind this 3D UI is out of his league as demonstrated by the amatuerish website on which it is being promoted.

    I apologize to the moderator for sending one over your head.
  • Before going into fully 3D widgets, I'd rather see the gdk component of Gtk+ ported to OpenGL. That way we'd all be able to run Gtk+ applications under *nix, BeOS, WinXX, MacOS, etc.

    There have been attempts at "native" ports of gdk to other platforms, but if we just went to OpenGL, we'd hit all of them at once.

    Once it works, we can start thinking about "extension" improvements like OpenGL-based themes.

  • Does this mean I'll have to walk through a maze and when I find the application I like, I shoot it?

    Seriously, that would be intuitive to lots of people nowadays

  • yet another 3D GUI story on slashdot. and every time i think this will be pretty pants. i can't see how a 3D gui would be easier to navigate than a 2D GUI. it would have to be pretty impressive to change my views.



    wray
  • Nah. This guy has it all wrong. The Big Collection of 3D Icons Floating in Space has been tried, and it sucks. SGI used to have a file browser like that; it was often installed on public demo machines, but nobody used it.

    As somebody pointed out about 3D gaming, the interface you really want for Quake if your goal is winning is a 2D map with friends and enemies shown. You click on the enemies, with the cursor snapping to them when nearby, and they get killed. That's "the Pentagon version of Quake". Game over.

  • Everytime someone announces a new VR/3D environment, GUI, or WM I am reminded of a scene from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash that really stuck in my mind when I read it..

    I don't have the book available to quote it, but in this scene the main character has to hack the 3D world (which he was one of the main programmers for) so he can spy on the bad guys unseen. So he logs into the world, hops on the VR subway to his house, goes into his VR room, sits down at his VR desk and (drum roll please) switches over to a 2D UI.

    It's a small section, only about 2 pages long. The reason why is something like it being preferred by true hackers because it is the fastest most efficent way to get work done.

    Every major application that we use is 2D. Does it really matter if the windows or menus are cool 3D objects? Maybe there just needs to be more research done on the subject. But until then I will always think of this character who developed this VR world, but drops it in a second when real work needs to be done.


    Sig:

  • 3D? (Score:1)

    by xor_zro ( 260375 )
    I don't see any 3D in those screenshots. He talks about a lot of stuff that is not shown on the screenshots.
  • Okay, the screen shots look damn fine, but I'm just thinking, at the moment the majority of computers users are used to the flat 2d menu systems, I can't think of any way of getting Jane Bloggs secretary to switch unless it's seriously intuitive. Also items like application support, for any 3rd party/mainstream application to run properly it would have to have its whole interface ported to it. Lastly good 3D support would have to increase a hell of a lot more in Linux, otherwise the only people who would be able to use it would need 1.4Ghz processors and 256Mb graphics cards. Basically I'd love for this to succeed, but I don't think it will happen. Just my 0.0001 pence worth. Seri
  • One of the toys that we have around here is a big honkin' stereo display (Pyramid systems ImmersaDesk) which we use during tours of the center (along with researchers who use it for visualizations). One thing that I've noticed is that many folks are quite suceptible to getting motion sickness after using the display. The problem seems to be that even though the scene may seem to be 3D, your inner-ear is telling your brain that it is not.
    Just think about how many folks you know that get nauseous after playing Doom/Quake/whatever and imagine how they would handle a 3D display...
    In sum, I think that it is an interesting project. However, for most folks, the disorientation caused by the stereo images would outweigh any perceived navigational benefits.
  • Although I think this could save space on the desktop, I'm not sure its really necessary.

  • Because it's then no problem to transfer it do a "true" 3D viewing device (read:"googles") when the tech has arived and is usable. With realtime 2D being nearly just about unable to push standard hardware to its limits consumers full 3D VR is just a few years around the corner. Trust me - the industry won't let time pass without pulling the money out of our pockets for such gadgets. Wait and see!
  • Remember that Workbench had another level of navigation - you could run apps in full size on their own unique screen. You could flip between screens, and even have portions of 2 screens displayed at the same time in different resolutions. I found it really useful (for running Real3d and some script editors at the same time for example). I found the concept of the Windoze single sceen and one resolution thing really limiting at first. Maybe 3d GUI's could explore this kind of idea, layers of full screen modes, or something. For fucks sake - use imagination not Photoshop!
  • I can see it now ...

    "Crap! Where's my resume??"

    [after having given up and retyped it as best you could ...]

    "Well whadya know? There it was all along, behind my hentai links! I've really gotta make sure I don't stack those up so high anymore."

  • those screenshot's didn't look very interesting, but that's just my opinion. hopefully those people will make usability testing.

  • > Users find themselves lost in space.

    Hell, I find myself lost in a pile of windows in a WIMP GUI as well.

    I could write lots of why 3D GUIs are a vain and why WIMP sucks as well and we should think of something better, but I have better things to do...
  • Blender is not GPL, it is still closed source.

    -- H[NaN]
  • The critical problem with any 3d interface proposal for a typical PC is that they all try to represent an N-dimensional information space by building a 3-dimensional visualization that is interacted with using -- here's the rub -- 2-dimensional interface tools: monitor, mouse, and keyboard. The fact is, N here is a very large number, and going from 2 dimensional representations to 3 dimensional representations is at most a trivial step towards the actual complexity of the system.

    The keyboard isn't much of a problem, but it's tricky to get a useful rendering of 3d space on a flat monitor (Quake doesn't cut it -- we really ought to have something more immersive to be useful) and a mouse just isn't designed to plot anything other than X,Y mappings. You need some sort of way to plot a point in space -- one of those old Virtual Reality Gloves or something -- to workably interace with a 3d environment.

    The problem is, as much work as it's going to take to get something like that going -- with new hardware interfaces of some kind and new software technologies to work it out -- it's still an inadequate solution to the underlying problem. The small step from 2d modeling to 3d modeling is barely worth it when you're trying to get to a representation of a, say, 1000d information space -- especially considering all the work it'll take, both on the part of developers and users.

    What we really need to do is rethink how we abstract out the complexity of increasingly powerful information systems. How can we represent this data in a way that humans can grapple with? Making a 1000d interface might be theoretically possible, but people can't even handle 4d models, and some of us aren't even that great with 3d or 2d ones :)

    Work like this is IMO a dead end. Until something comes along that really rethinks how we model intricately complex dataspaces, we're going to be sitting on the Desktop plateau for a while, at least in terms of actual progress towards system usability.



  • I think it's about time to ban that word, "intuitive", from discourse on user interfaces. Increasingly, it means nothing, or worse. Some idiot or other no doubt felt that it would be "intuitive" to rig up application interfaces to mimic "real- world" objects; half those idiots must work for Apple now, and thus we get QuickTime 4 Player, Sherlock, Aqua, etc. "Intuitiveness" isn't a testable or falsifiable concept; I can make whatever claims I want about what is "intuitive", and who is to prove me wrong? hyacinthus
  • This is probaly the 5th time I've heard about a 3dGUI. I year ago someone released one for Win98 and it was useless. I tried it for a couple of days and found out that it was taking me longer to 'spin' the desktop, and zoom in to the app, that it took to just click on the app with out all the (not so) pretty graphics.

    D
    Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands

  • personally, i can't get enough mouse buttons. i currently run a logitech wheelman pro, it has the two regular buttons, a wheel (which also acts liek a button) and a thumb button. every button on the mouse i use constantly and find infinitly useful. if i only had a fifth button, i'd be happy. this is, of course, under a win environment. it should be interesting to see how c3d puts these buttons to use.
  • i hate scroll bars, all my windows have tiny tiny scroll bars because i have a wheel. but sometimes they come in useful, ie: slashdot, it would take a really long time to scroll all the way to the bottom of a long post if i only used the wheel, its these times i like having the scroll bar around.

    besides, i've used systems that don't have scrollbars and it slows down user functionality because you have to wait until what you want pops up. i find this rather annoying

  • Because it's then no problem to transfer it do a "true" 3D viewing device (read:"googles") when the tech has arived and is usable.

    Wow! I wonder what a 3D web search on Google will look like. Could be pretty cool.

    Sorry, couldn't resist.

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by Daimaou ( 97573 )
    I like the new rubik's cube interface.
  • When's the last time you were writing a letter, and flipped windows to check a web page?

    When's the last time you were brushing your teeth and 'flipped windows' to hang a picture on a wall in the basement, and then return to brushing your teeth?

    Or did you do like most of us, and put down the toothbrush, walk out of the bathroom, out into the garage for a hammer, back inside and down into the basement, over to the wall, nail in the hook, put up the painting, walk back upstairs, out into the garage to deposit the hammer, back inside and to the bathroom to finish brushing your teeth?

    We do certain tasks in the computer because their real world counterparts take to long. Typing instead of using a pencil. Sending email instead of finding an envelope, getting that foul-tasting goo on your tongue, and putting the thing in the mailbox. Did you remember a stamp?

    In short, don't think for a moment that modeling 3-D productivity tools after the real world is going to get you any sort of respect from your users.

    Do anything else, so long as you remember that the human brain, as stated before, doesn't really deal well with 3D. Any arboreal skills our brains had for navigating in 3 dimensions fled some time ago, after we adapted to walking. You or I may retain this ability, but the average person doesn't.

    -
  • Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized

    Actually, you're wrong. It makes use of the areas near the corners, which are the worst. The corners themselves -- the ONE PIXEL -- are easy because you can sling the mouse really hard and it will STOP there. try clicking in the very corner on windows -- there is a convenient two-pixel border that prevents this from actually helping. they waste every corner and every edge. No place on the edge of the screen in windows is used. Not one. Mac got this one right. there was an article on /. a while back, don't have the link. (And , fwiw, I use windows not mac.)

  • I think any desktop that tries a 3D paradigm is radical. But that isn't my point.

    I want to know, how do you know what will "work" ? What standards do you use? What are your proofs?

    Instead we have a whole class of armchair programmers who know practically nothing about implementing the systems they describe.

    Really, now. Maybe mapping 2D operation onto 3D will work? The author of this program has proof of concept. Where's yours?
  • What I see there in filemanager screenshot is the same old MSexplorer panel sans scrollbar. The idea of stripping scrollbar is pretty dumb - now I couldn't do fast steps with "Directional lock". Also, an idea of notifying applications on update doesn't look good - why just not to check directory timestamps?
    No signs of "3D file hieararchy" or even principles on which it will be based are shown. Mostly, since Unix file hierarchy (if we ignore links) is a planar graf (a tree), it doesn't need any 3D representation. Also, I guess it would be a PITA to work with 3D filesystem on 2D monitor. The clever use of the mouse buttons for directory tree movements is definitely cute, but I fail to see here innovative 3D design. Using mouse wheel doesn't make an application 3D, as well as creative use of bevels and shadows in window borders.

    The only real 3D thing is that cube, but I'm afraid users won't like this. Just imagine your phone dialer pad in cubic shape. Would you like dialing on such a thing? Maybe there could be a trainign that will allow user to effectively use such gadget, but I fear this will be no better than plain old planar button dialer.

    Now, if we had some kind of 3D control device (gloves?) and 3D display (goggles, I guess), we might have some use of such an interface. However, I don't see it (i.e., widely distributed use of gloves and goggles as primary I/O devices, replacing displays and keyboards/mouses) happening in the next 50 years.

  • Re:Sounds really intuitive, no no, really. (Score:3)

    by wish bot ( 265150 ) on Thursday December 21, 2000 @01:50AM (#545660)
    Although you can do alot of stuff quickly in the corners of the sceen - the simple fact of life is that most of the real work - the important stuff - happens in the middle. This is one this that seems to be ignored time and time again by interface designers. How to you do the work (in the certre of the screen) without having to move back and forth constantly to change tool, which is really painful. What is really nice are context sensitive tools and menus. The best one i've seen in a while is in a cad program called Archicad. Dependeing on which bit of the model the pointer is over, you can access a pop up floating menu, giving access to tools to modify that particulr section. The menu will float around with the mouse movements while you need it, and when you don't it pops down again.Really simple - really powerful. We really need more creative/contextual tools. Not pretty pretty icons or concentrated tools in the corner of the screen.
  • I agree, without having something like a glove to use for a 3 dimenional area, a 3D desktop just won't work. I can already see that one of the main problems would be the "intuitive" interface. Say perhaps you just want to move the mouse out of the way, or want to get a something lower on the Y axis, 2D, easy, just move the mouse, but if you did this with the cub, or their file manage. Then in most cases the desktop will "intuitively know" that you're actually tryin to flip the cube, or scroll the window. The complication gets even worse in 1st person view. Are you trying to gets something behind this app? Are you trying to swivle your view of the screen to look around the desk top. In first person view, you would definately need to have the VR goggles and gloves. While it's a nice idea. Right now the technology needed for it just doesn't exsist, or isn't readily available.
  • First of all, the file system doesn't need to be changed. Whether it be Linux, or another platform, leave it be. It makes navigating through a non-3d gui easier.

    Second, give the people the option of having a 3D gui, WHILE IT'S ALREADY THERE!!! This means that hitting alt-(insert desired key here) will bring your screen back to the front side cube, where most of your stuff will sit.

    Third. Control. The ability to control the environment is essential. Take a lesson from Homeworld, in their 3d environment, and design it around that. Allow people to utilize the mouse for what it was intended. Object manipulation. (In this case, the object being the 3d screen itself.)

    And lastly, don't worry about making everything read correctly. If someone is talented enough to squiggle thier screen around so they're looking at it backwards, they deserve to read the letters backwards too. That's a true 3D environment, after all.

    krystal_blade

  • It is 3d, look closely at thie sides of the menus and apps, they are polygon based 3d renders. I don't really see a huge usability point here, but they have some neat ideas, and besides, it looks great...

    //drool shorts out keyboard//
  • C3D will have2 different Perspectives 3rd Person and 1st Person. 3rd Person is shown here... the 1st Person Perspective is even faster to use than the 3rd Person view point. The 1st Person View Point will not be discussed at this time.

    "We have this great new technology that is faster and better. It will not be discussed at this time.

    What?! Okay, now I'm really curious. Could someone please explain to everyone the difference? I'm going to die of curiousity!

  • Actually the graphics seem like they could be done on a system today with a mid-range vid card (geforce2 MX), and its basicly just a 3d representation on a 2d GUI anyway, so it shouldnt be too difficult to learn. I really see no point, but it looks damn good.
  • It's called File System Navigator or http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html

    Now it would be very cool if FSN were ported to something else besides IRIX (I run it on an Indy and it's actually quite useful, especially for spotting diskspace hogs).

    Of course let us not forget using 'Doom as a tool for system administration' http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

    PID 1 is a camper though :-P

    -g8
  • I enjoy Be's desktop quite much as well. I like Enlightenment too, but its still not fast enough for my tastes...
  • On the Macs I've used both the Apple menu in the upper left and the app menu in the upper right are a couple of pixels from the corner. They do still have the advantage of being along the top edge of the screen, but I wonder why they didn't just go all the way to the corners?
  • I think that the toolbar method of item selection is MUCH superior to menus when you are doing repetitious (sp?) things. Consider an Adobe Photoshop example:

    You want to do progressive sharpen and de-specle operations on an image. Normally (ignoring any keyboard commands) you would have to move to the menubar and click the mouse to pull down menus, then move to a the filters menu (could be done by this time) move to the sharpen sub menu, then actually move to and select the sharpen item. Now repeat this for the de-specle.

    With a toolbar approach, you can simply move the mouse (once) to the button and click the damn thing. then move a bit left or right (depending on the layout of the bar.) and click once more.

    The author seems to imply that menus (mac or otherwise) are simply MUCH faster than toolbars and clutter up the screen less. While i agree that menus are less cluttering, i completely disagree that they are faster. move the mouse around in menus while examining the travel time then check the toolbar approach, and you will see what i mean.
  • Last time I checked, the majority of people who tried out Quake or other first-person shooters only took a few minutes to get the feel of aiming with a mouse and using forward/backward keys to move. The same concept could easily be applied to a user interface. I don't understand the need for new equipment as thousands of users already have a common way of moving through a 3D space. Someone could aim/move themselves towards an application and click on a title bar to lock/unlock themselves to it. The mouse could then revert to normal operation for 2D on the window.

    If anyone has used that old Logitech(?) 3D mouse they may remember the muscle fatigue after some use, despite it being fairly light. I don't doubt there is a yet to be designed piece of equipment that will be great, but it's unnecessary now.

    IMHO, I have yet to feel the need for a 3D interface for my development machine or home machine, but I can recognize the "cool" factor that goes with it.
  • I see the the usefulness of a 3D-GUI, but most people are just trying to use a 3D interface to replace what we have now. I don't see this as being particularly useful.

    Although I'm a big fan of 3D, I love the two dimensional desktop I use now. I go into my 3D accelerated games and enjoy it, but as far as the way I work, I don't see any use for a 3D interface, it would just make things clumsy.

    However, when you have 3D visualisation hardware instead of standard 2D hardware (such as 3D shutter glasses, HMDs, or applications such as CAVE technology), a 3D interface makes much more sense. But designing a GUI for that interface shouldn't necessarily be going in a different direction than 2D interfaces have already gone. Projects such as C3D would seem to work best in this type of environment, along with a three dimensional windowing system that would allow for the user to grab and move the windows in any plane and tilt as they need fit to hold them around themselves. (Imagine a zero-g desk where you could position the many books and papers and tools you are using anywhere, for you to see and read or use from where you sit).

    To me, that seems to be the logical application for 3D interfaces. Once those types of hardware become readily available, I'm sure that 3D GUIs will become commmonplace. For now though, since most of us are still using good ol' CRTs or LCD displays in 2D without shutterglasses, I think we should stick to regular 2D GUIs.

    -Julius X

  • In short, don't think for a moment that modeling 3-D productivity tools after the real world is going to get you any sort of respect from your users.

    Yes, just to clarify, that's exactly the point I was making (I wasn't very clear).

    I mean, come on, how long does it take a user to run from one end of a Quake level to the other... when a 2D map and a click will get you there in an instant??

    Especially when the 3D representations don't even need to have physical qualities. They don't have to behave like solids. Perhaps transluscent planes or clouds or something. Data with depth, or some sort of colour metaphor. These sorts of experiments might be interesting (isn't someone doing this stuff somewhere?), but might not lead anywhere anyhow.

  • The Amiga MagicMenu program does what you want. On an Amiga. (D'oh!).
  • http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=%223d+gui%22&h c=0&hs=0 [yahoo.com]

    Web Page Matches (1 - 20 of about 280)
  • I know several people, including myself, who have a 2-button mouse, and a wheel. The wheel is used as a third button. Pressing both at the same time is an uncomfortable thing to do; not something I'd want to do every time I go to start a program.

    Also, what about the average computer user - who has two buttons? They have to throw out their mouse and try to find a piece of hardware that is barely made?!

  • You can already do lots of true 3d gui stuff. I remember seeing a shell replacement for windows that made your desktop 3d, ie. you can move the icons around in 3d, so you have more space. personally, I don't have icons on my desktop, so I dont need that, put its still cool... I really don't know what the perfect interface will be. I, personaly, am waiting for the day when I can plug my brain right into my PC, and download. Just hope I don't get a trojan. heh Maybe we'll see a new defense in courts pop up. Instead of not guilty by reason of insanity, itll be not guilty by reason of trojans. Well, thats what you get for running windows on your brain I guess...
  • Nah, 2D cards have rendering hardware, bit blitting and so on. Even the cheapest cards have this.
  • Well, today most video cards use on-board T&L, which means that the CPU is doing jack shit graphics wise, more or less. There is a thing called 2d acceleration though, and most OSes use this for their GUIs.

  • Man, somebody tries to break out of the traditional WIMP interface and you guys tear them to pieces! I really think the WIMP interface is restrictive and should be replaced or at least worked over. I'm not saying that this particular one is the best one in the world, but at least it's a step in *some* direction.

    I think Linux has a great opportunity to build a great UI. I have been reading The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin and I like the things he is saying. Like have menu bars at the top of the screen (like the MacOS & AmigaOS) instead of just below the top (like Windows). This way the user can slam the mouse to the top of the screen and not have to worry about overshooting the menu bar.

    Later...
  • 3d projections onto a 2d surface... hm... where have i heard of that before? wait, i hear a voice... it's saying... "retina".

    huh.

    wonder what that means...

  • And X fonts will look good too...

  • I would like a desktop GUI that is similar to the soon to be released (hopefully) game, Black and White. After seeing this inteface demoed recently, I have to say, It would be damn cool to have a GUI like that. You could download new themes that were whole new maps of some cool fantasy land, and stick your icons in it wherever you want. Then when you want to run one of your programs, you just click on the ground around you, and move around the area. You get to the icon you want you double click it, and it zooms in on the face of the icon, which would then load the app itself. There would be a minimize button(zoom back out), and a close button(obviously stops the program). The viewer would have control of rotating the camera, but the movement would occur automaticly, when you click something in the world.

    Anyway there are lots of cool things that could be done to GUIs, but it really makes little difference in the great scheme of things, does it?
  • You're absolutely right - our perception of reality is often very unreliable. In the absence of depth-perception, it's quite easy to fake out the eye brain with false perspectives, trompe-l'oeils etc.

  • Public? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From the link:

    "The programming API will take an object oriented approach that will be completely public."

    Heh, what's the point in using OO if everything is public? :)

    /me thinks he/she should reword this...
  • I know first-year-computer-people who haven't grasped the drag and drop metaphor in half a year while sitting in front of a mac. Intuitive is relative! Get used to the Homeworld 3D navigation (that best 2D mouse based I know) and in half a year YOU'll call it intuitive.
  • Looking from the screen shots and notcing the rather HUGE fonts, this reminds me of what computer screens look like on movies and TV. Does everything make a bell and whistle as well as have text scroll by at 110 baud?

    I'd rather have smaller and easy-to-read fonts to see my files and folders instead of this. This looks more like some game's GUI.
  • I have 3 major problems with beos (perhaps someone could enlight me ;): - the filemanage How to navigate BIG directory structures ? The right-click menu is AWFUL, and the windows-like-pop-up-new-window-for-every-directory also. any GOOD shells ? (I know there is some norton commander clone for it) - network I had allways problems mounting my linux server .. either with NFS or SMB - webbrowser that build in doesn't cut it. And I don't like opera. does mozilla exists for be ? (quite some time ago i checked beos ;)
    Samba Information HQ
  • No .. I don't think so ;)

    IIRC a directory-change-callback function is
    in the 2.4 vfs. look on kernel-traffic for details.

    (and this is a GOOD thing. I REALLY miss this feature in MOST os filebrowsers ... WHY should you POLL (argh!) the FS for information ????)

    (even SMB has support for this IIRC)


    Samba Information HQ

  • Everybody is looking for the next revolutionary design to replace WIMP. It is funny how all the text you're reading is on a two-dimensional plane, and the only other common means of communication is voice.

    A boring unintrusive UI is very good. IMHO the ultimate UI is in dedicated physical devices. Rendering them in VR is just perpetuating the personal computer beyond what it really needs to be... in other words for the people trying to shatter the mould of thinking in WIMP, they're trapped in the mould of the PC.

  • Five, actually (Score:3)

    by DreamerFi ( 78710 ) <john@sinAUDENteur.com minus poet> on Thursday December 21, 2000 @03:11AM (#545700) Homepage
    Actually, there's five locations on the screen that are all equally fast to reach by mouse. Tog has an excellent [asktog.com] article on this, I'd recommend you read it.. It's called A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts, look at question 3 of the Quiz.
  • ... throw Lara Croft [eidosinteractive.com] in there as an 'agent' so I can stare at her ass while she fetches files for me :)
    Sean
  • A few years ago everyone was trying to make OSes and commercial 3D engines. Now everyone is trying to make 3D GUIs.

    Name five 3D GUI projects.
  • OK, it doesn't really have to be, but if it's going to be a GPL system they would want to use all GPL (or at least free, open source) tools.

    Otherwise it's going to another KDE holy war.
  • lol, yeah. What we really need is a lot more screen space (i.e., 4 or 5 monitors so that we can be in several applications at once without having to change tasks. That is, slightly moving my head and refocusing has much less latency than a) scanning a taskbar for a task
    b)if location already "cached" end
    b) finding the icon that matches your app
    d)if only one app of said type open end
    e) read text next to icon to isolate the window you want...

    In a 3d navigable interface where you navigate around using spatial skills you would have to travel around clicking on icons with text under them or something. But how does that actually increase efficiency? Maybe if you have 124 applications open at once...

    It would be kind of cool to navigate tasks by clicking on constellations or something though (or maybe not).

    I've tried a lot of "alternative" interfaces and most of them are annoying and time wasting, even after forcing myself to spend a week re-training myself how, what and where to click.

    From what I see here though the story is just a normal 2d interface that's been jazzed up with some 3d graphics. Nothing special.

  • GUI's (Score:2)

    by iomud ( 241310 )
    I rather enjoy BeOS's desktop environment very crisp, clean and simple, why must we dig deep for the eye candy when half the time it breaks when running simple normal operations. Just make it fast and intuitive...

  • I like your old stuff better than your new stuff (Score:3)

    by wish bot ( 265150 ) on Thursday December 21, 2000 @12:30AM (#545715)
    Why? Well I guess the answer is because he can, but what I really mean is why put all ths effort into an interface that, although looks 3d, is really just some pretty pictures pasted onto the same old buttons. All it does is add another level to the Mac v Windoze war ("but I can make better icons in windoze!" - "fuck that - i just boot up a c64 when I get the URGE to edit icons") What about thinking about truely new interfaces that allow people to do/create totally new things? To think in different ways, create new and insightful ideas buy linking infomation in previous unthought of ways. That is what GUI design should be about. If you want to edit icons, stick with the c64. For an example try a piece of software called Revamp. It runs ontop of Propellorhead's Rebirth. If you've got a winbox or a mac and some spare time and an liking of electronic music, give it a go. www.revamp.org [revamp.org]
  • A lot of people I know who use computers every day (though not power users like most /. readers) never use an application in anything but full screen mode and it makes me wonder when microsoft will stop allowing resizable windows because it "confuses users".

    I'm a power user/programmer and I dislike resizable windows. I would much prefer each application to have its own screen and a way to hotkey between them. Seriously. The faux desktop interface adds more doodads and nonsense than it is worth.

  • 2D Content in 3D Worlds (Score:3)

    by twisty ( 179219 ) on Thursday December 21, 2000 @03:46AM (#545725) Homepage Journal
    That's a good point... Most of us aren't thinking in terms of making the 2D content anything more than a 3D rep of the old 2D. Let's consider:

    2D Desktops
    The desktop usually contains a 2D array of a 1D file list... However there is an implied Third Dimension that there is a depth of content under the surface of each icon. A possible 3D model may place a 2D ground map of file icons, each standing upon a 3D Pedistal which presents the file properties, like a dedication plaque, author photo, etc. Atop the pedastal would be the 3D representation of the content, its scale and depth, its motion of activity, etc.

    3D Content
    3D is more useful for real 3D content. It'd be great to do RAD development of houses just by a Fantasia of powers... a sorcerer's aprentice lifting walls and stairs at the wave of a hand. Actors animated by interperating the "data sock puppet." Quake designers coould go nuts!

    3D Hardware
    I've been waiting for videophones long before Max Headroom had them everywhere... but even a great show like that overlooked their use as a VR Interface. If you could go anywhere to use a Videophone booth, you could call your computer and communicate with speech and gesture recognition. Also, you could dial pay services for online videogaming using nothing more than the phone, navigating dungeons and swinging swords... physically or virtually. That kind of "non-appliance VR" is common since Myron Kruger's Videoplace.

    Likewise, you could out-do Star Trek if we had 3D webcams and 3D projectors... even the keyboard could become a non-appliance solid-state projection, making the Trek sets look like cardboard.

  • Is right here [optic-xeon.com].



    Call me a bigot, but if this guy codes C/C++ like he does HTML, you will NEVER see this project get off of the ground. Ick.



    Rami
    --

  • Sounds so easy... (Score:4)

    by Jeremy Lee ( 9313 ) on Thursday December 21, 2000 @12:38AM (#545734) Homepage

    Having recently spend two weeks building an ultimately unsucessful 3D database visualization system, (Java3D rocks!) I can tell you it's a LOT harder than it sounds, a bit like speech recognition.

    The main problem is that there is no consistent paradigm for 3D interaction... no equivalent of a desktop metaphor. Users find themselves lost in space. And such systems are hard to interact with properly with a 2D screen and mouse - the missing degree of freedom create a 'modal' system that cannot be intuitive.

    But, if you have to do it, here are Orinoco's tips:

    1: Make everything about 20% transparent. You can't work with half the environment hidden behind the other half.

    2: View control is the key. Don't make the user have to spin and rotate. Let them pick objects of interest, and then move the camera to a good view of it.

    3: Don't try to model a complete 3D environment. Instead, make it "2.5D", with the extra dimension used to express an intrisic scalar quantity rather than a spatial one. eg: A 2-D scatterplot, but each point is instead a bar who's height indicates something.

    4: Create a 'groundplane'. Stick to stacking things above this.

    5: A 'recursive boxes' scheme, with whole new scenes hidden inside pickable objects works well. (A folder metaphor, if you will)

    Just consider the most effective 3D application yet - 3D modelling. Even with a perfect 1:1 correspondence between the visual representation and the underlying model, it still takes experts to manipulate the interface.

    Frankly, I think 3D interfaces have to wait until we have cheap and available 3D input devices.

    Finally, there's a lot of research that has been done (SIGGRAPH, to name a source) that you would be silly to ignore.
  • Really, weve seen enough of these. From the one in Jurassic Park, to the ones that keep popping up here every so often.

    The one thing they have in common is that none of them help me work faster. Why doesn't someone put more effort into developing a more intuitive command line and forget about all the cool-but-useless 3D GUI's and file managers?

  • so umm, seeing we're on the road of futility.. anyone feel like making an isometric rpg-style gui?

  • - The view should be always as if you are looking to the 'computer world' through a window(the screen) and behind it there are objects, some closer than others.

    - Object shapes suggest function.

    - Use the mouse to point to an object (i.e. a directory 'door' or a file ), just like aiming in a 3D game.

    - One mouse button can zoom the view on the pointed object, with additional text wich defines properties etc ..., the other to move
    your point of view close to the object, changing the perspective. A double click uses the object.

    - Stick on movement on a plane. Walking is easier than flying. If needed, programs may create stairs and/or elevators.

    - A suitable metafora could be a buiding. The ground floor is the 'raw' file-system, with a room for each directory, with doors carrying to sub-directories and to the parent directory. Other floors are user-defined 'desktops' for diffferent type of activities ( office, games, etc ... ).Installation programs may create their own rooms and floors.

    - Drag and drop. Just like now, but 3D, constrained on the current 'walking plane'.

    - Allow user to carry a tool box, with the most used programs/documents. Again, just like games.

    - You need an easy way to turn around yorself : the mouse wheel ?

    Mmm ... it looks like a cross between today desktops and DukeNukem3D (that being the last game I played, a few years ago). But why throw away good ideas? And games _are_ intuitive, after all.
  • Forgive me. I thought we were talking about a desktop here. Anyway, that reminds me of this hyperbolic tree [ulib.org] and the brain [thebrain.com]. The first can't show multidimensional data. The second can, though it just makes semi-transparent links between categories and objects and isn't good for anything other than traversing its tree/web in a single context.
  • C3D will use a 4 button mouse with mouse wheel as the standard mouse. The user emulates this four button mouse with a 3 button mouse with a mouse wheel by clicking the middle and right buttons at the same time

    I'm sorry, but this just sounds ridiculous to me. User interfaces are pretty badly designed as it is, adding more mouse buttons doesn't solve anything. It just makes it worse.

    Some time ago, someone posted a link to a site discussing user interface design, which discussed some of the great ideas and concepts that are simply ignored. For example, what are the 4 locations on the screen to which you can move the mouse very fast? The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized.

    Perhaps a bigger problem in this scenario is that of the menus within these windows. If they're not maximized, then to get to the menu in each window you have to click in a different location every time. This is very non-intuitive. I personally love the system on the Amiga workbench, where holding down the right mouse button anywhere inside the app would bring down the previously invisible menu at the top. Since it was at the edge of the screen, you could move and select a menu item very quickly. I'd love to see this system implement again, but I haven't yet.

    Oops, kind of got a bit off topic there. I guess my point is, people who design user interfaces should really be looking at some of the great useability studies that have been done, and start implementing them before they concentrate on the eye-candy.

  • ": Make everything about 20% transparent. You can't work with half the environment hidden behind the other half"

    Um, and make me blind?

    ": A 'recursive boxes' scheme, with whole new scenes hidden inside pickable objects works well. (A folder metaphor, if you will)"

    How is navigating a hierarchy with "hidden" objects/tasks/whatever better than a linear list of tasks/objects/whatever if the screen has plenty of space to display the tasks in a linear manner (i.e., the windows/gnome task/start menu?). Do people really have this many applications open at once? I sometimes have >30 apps open at a time and the latency to switch tasks while longer is still fast because after getting "in the groove" of a certain pattern of switching tasks I will remember exactly where a task is on the bar and find it extremely fast.

    Navigating some hierarchy would be a lot slower, even if I know exactly where I'm going -- no?
  • Maybe it's just me, but I think a 3d desktop is, by its very nature, inferior to a 3d one. When working at my office desk, I prefer things spread out in front of me (2d, like a present-day O/S desktop), rather than having everything stacked all on top of eachother (3d). The main reason is that if there is space available, things are easier to find when you can see them, rather than having to search through 3d stacks. This just seems like a solution looking for a problem (and not finding one).

  • Much more than a GUI! (Score:5)

    by bellings ( 137948 ) on Thursday December 21, 2000 @12:55AM (#545752)
    Also on their webpage:
    We will eliminate the need for a refresh button by having a sophisticated internal update file system.
    CmdrTaco, you should be ashamed. This isn't just a 3D GUI project by any strech of the imagination -- they're also writing a brand new file system. I can't wait!

    And I see they've also developed a special "DWIM" (Do What I Mean) technology, too:
    if you had folders that were not in view just move your cursor down to the bottom edge of the display box and the folder you want would automatically scroll up to your cursor.
    Wow! I hope they get a patent on that, before Microsoft steals it from them!

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