On 3D Interfaces

(Up to: Interfaces )

Original discussion on BookBlog

The "3D" we're used to - the real world - is slow and inefficient, and ironically, due to its increased dimensional capacity, more restrictive in many ways.

Fortunately, our brain doesn't (so much) work in such ways. Information is - for the most part - instantly accessible, and stored in pretty abstract, freeflowing ways. In coding terms, "processing" in the real world is like trying to find a particular item in a 3-dimensional array - you have to find/know where something is and then get to it, whereas processing in the brain seems to act more like a hashtable, or at least an extremely-linked graph - things are tied together within it semantically rather than geographically.

The last Nielsen quote above ("3d is confusing because the space being modeled has more than three dimensions") could also be considered in inverse. 3d is confusing because the space being modeled has one (or even, perhaps, no) dimension, and tring to extrapolate it into a 3d world adds unnecessary complexity.

I think there could be some... "interesting" aspects to business-related 3d worlds. For instance, I'd like to see an interface that represented my focus of attention in 3d terms, along with others. By using, say, proximity (of someone's avatar to mine) as a measure of how related our current activities are (e.g. 2 people coding may be close together), and some kind of directional aspect (e.g. how much are people facing me) to indicate how "available" people are (how much they're willing to break from their activity and talk), I think you could get some useful communication ideas emerging.

But maybe you could do that with a 2D list, as well...