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I think there is a severe lack of imagination going on here. A pencil is a 3D interface. This is as good a time as any to post this eight-year old gem from Bre

I think there is a severe lack of imagination going on here. A pencil is a 3D interface. This is as good a time as any to post this eight-year old gem from Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

gpm 7y ago
We have 3d output capabilities, we maneuver our hands in 3 dimensions. As jerf explains in a comment above better than I can we only have 2d input capabilities. I interpret this post as primarily saying that the UI's display (as in what is fed to our input) should only be 2d, not necessarily the other way around. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963247 Edit: Linked wrong comment, fixed.
- pazimzadeh 7y ago
  The idea that we only have 2D input doesn't make sense to me. If that were the case, how would we drive a car or ride a bike? You don't need to jump between focusing on things that are far away and up close, as Carmack says. It's totally natural. I would argue that humans, like most mammals, are actually most at ease in an immersive 3D medium. And in theory, the only thing stopping us from implementing something like Bret Victor's Dynamicland (https://dynamicland.org https://dynamicland.org) in VR is the lack of good 3D input methods, like say a pair of sensor-ridden smart gloves. John Carmack's argument reminds me of the early criticisms of the point-and-click interface (2D), and how at its inception it was much less efficient than the well developed command line interface (1D). Plus, the most designers are trained in 2D interfaces so they're probably applying the wrong assumptions for 3D.
  - zlsa 7y ago
    You can drive a car without depth perception. You don't need to see the depth of cars/obstacles/the road if it can be deduced from geometry.
    - pazimzadeh 7y ago
      Point taken, but then why go through all the trouble to evolve two eyes? Just in case one gets poked or something?
      - gpm 7y ago
        I bet one getting poked has more to do with it than you think. We have two lungs too after all and they're a lot less exposed than your eyes. I use that redundancy with a disturbing amount of regularity when biking too... with something getting in one eye and temporarily disabling it (I really need to look into some form of eye protection from road dust). But thinking of depth in vision like color also makes a lot of sense, it's extra information but not an extra "physical" dimension. You can't see inside a sphere but you can a circle.
        pazimzadeh 7y ago
        I can think of even more ways we benefit from having two eyes, like not having to whip your head back and forth if you want to scan the landscape. But if they were mainly for redundancy the eyes might be closer together, like the nostrils (and unlike ears, which help with spatial awareness). I think the fact that modern life requires less and less depth perception (when’s the last time you had to judge how far to throw a spear, etc) might be leading us astray here.
  - comex 7y ago
    2D + depth. We can tell how far away the car in front of us is, but it occludes our view of cars in front of it. That’s good enough to drive, but suboptimal. If you were designing a user interface meant to show someone the positions of cars on roads – i.e. a map – you would use a bird’s-eye view, since roads are mostly 2D from that perspective.
Dirlewanger 7y ago
Great read. Really highlights all the problems I have with touch interfaces. Unfortunately I don't see it changing much in the near-future mainly because it's Good Enough for most people and most operations. Wish someone would put money into researching tactile screen interfaces that physically deform and respond to touch.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
comex 7y ago
> A pencil is a 3D interface. Is it? I’d say the VR analogue of a pencil is a pointing device, which makes the user interface the VR analogue of paper. And paper is fundamentally a 2D interface. There are some 3D actions like turning a page, but those are secondary and rare. You can move and rotate the paper as a whole in 3D, and that’s useful, but the same functionality can easily be added to VR 2D interfaces. On the other hand, there are other types of art that are fundamentally 3D, such as sculpture and pottery – but both of those rely on feeling a 3D object with your hands, which partially bypasses the 2D limitation of vision, but isn’t yet possible to emulate in VR. Then again, there’s also the common VR toy of a “pencil” that doodles in thin air, which is certainly interesting... though I’m not sure how well it generalizes to more abstract user interfaces. If you’re using such a system, you have to constantly rotate the object you’re drawing, and/or move your body around, in order to properly perceive the object in 3D. This is kind of a pain. If your primary goal is to create a 3D object, it’s an unavoidable pain and the benefit is well worth it; but if what you’re interacting with is just an abstract interface meant to manipulate something non-spatial, it’s probably better to avoid.
- kragen 7y ago
  > both of those rely on feeling a 3D object with your hands, which partially bypasses the 2D limitation of vision, but isn’t yet possible to emulate in VR. That's the entire point of the comment you're responding to and the reason for Dynamicland.
  - comex 7y ago
    If so, it was off topic. John Carmack's post was about VR interfaces, and I interpreted the parent comment in that context. In any case, I would contest that bypassing the limitations of vision, specifically, represents a significant part of the reason for Dynamicland.
    - kragen 7y ago
      If you "would contest" that, it's because you still haven't read the essay that was linked in the putatively off-topic comment you were "responding" to, after eight years. And, yeah, you could try to redefine "VR" and even "3D interfaces" (the actual topic) as being strictly limited to "binocular video responding to a head tracker", but even "VR" researchers have been researching haptic and kinesthetic feedback from a zillion angles for a lot more than eight years, so I don't think it's off-topic at all.
hinkley 7y ago
A keyboard is also a 3D interface with one dimension constrained. I have to be able to move my hand past the keyboard without accidentally inputting data. You can see the problems of this kind when you have a large touch screen and people try to gesture at it while talking and end up accidentally changing something. Look at machine rooms in submarines or control rooms for power plants or tv studios. Different tasks are in different locations sure, but the inputs are constrained to an area near the arc defined by the fingers at a comfortable distance from the shoulder. For really good reasons.
aaron695 7y ago
> A pencil is a 3D interface. A pencil is 2D or less, it can't move on a third axis, a good example of why 3D is worse (Ever seen someone using the rare 3Dish pencils?)

gpm 7y ago

We have 3d output capabilities, we maneuver our hands in 3 dimensions. As jerf explains in a comment above better than I can we only have 2d input capabilities. I interpret this post as primarily saying that the UI's display (as in what is fed to our input) should only be 2d, not necessarily the other way around. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19963247 Edit: Linked wrong comment, fixed.

pazimzadeh 7y ago
The idea that we only have 2D input doesn't make sense to me. If that were the case, how would we drive a car or ride a bike? You don't need to jump between focusing on things that are far away and up close, as Carmack says. It's totally natural. I would argue that humans, like most mammals, are actually most at ease in an immersive 3D medium. And in theory, the only thing stopping us from implementing something like Bret Victor's Dynamicland (https://dynamicland.org https://dynamicland.org) in VR is the lack of good 3D input methods, like say a pair of sensor-ridden smart gloves. John Carmack's argument reminds me of the early criticisms of the point-and-click interface (2D), and how at its inception it was much less efficient than the well developed command line interface (1D). Plus, the most designers are trained in 2D interfaces so they're probably applying the wrong assumptions for 3D.
- zlsa 7y ago
  You can drive a car without depth perception. You don't need to see the depth of cars/obstacles/the road if it can be deduced from geometry.
  - pazimzadeh 7y ago
    Point taken, but then why go through all the trouble to evolve two eyes? Just in case one gets poked or something?
    - gpm 7y ago
      I bet one getting poked has more to do with it than you think. We have two lungs too after all and they're a lot less exposed than your eyes. I use that redundancy with a disturbing amount of regularity when biking too... with something getting in one eye and temporarily disabling it (I really need to look into some form of eye protection from road dust). But thinking of depth in vision like color also makes a lot of sense, it's extra information but not an extra "physical" dimension. You can't see inside a sphere but you can a circle.
      - pazimzadeh 7y ago
        I can think of even more ways we benefit from having two eyes, like not having to whip your head back and forth if you want to scan the landscape. But if they were mainly for redundancy the eyes might be closer together, like the nostrils (and unlike ears, which help with spatial awareness). I think the fact that modern life requires less and less depth perception (when’s the last time you had to judge how far to throw a spear, etc) might be leading us astray here.
- comex 7y ago
  2D + depth. We can tell how far away the car in front of us is, but it occludes our view of cars in front of it. That’s good enough to drive, but suboptimal. If you were designing a user interface meant to show someone the positions of cars on roads – i.e. a map – you would use a bird’s-eye view, since roads are mostly 2D from that perspective.

Dirlewanger 7y ago

Great read. Really highlights all the problems I have with touch interfaces. Unfortunately I don't see it changing much in the near-future mainly because it's Good Enough for most people and most operations. Wish someone would put money into researching tactile screen interfaces that physically deform and respond to touch.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

comex 7y ago

> A pencil is a 3D interface. Is it? I’d say the VR analogue of a pencil is a pointing device, which makes the user interface the VR analogue of paper. And paper is fundamentally a 2D interface. There are some 3D actions like turning a page, but those are secondary and rare. You can move and rotate the paper as a whole in 3D, and that’s useful, but the same functionality can easily be added to VR 2D interfaces. On the other hand, there are other types of art that are fundamentally 3D, such as sculpture and pottery – but both of those rely on feeling a 3D object with your hands, which partially bypasses the 2D limitation of vision, but isn’t yet possible to emulate in VR. Then again, there’s also the common VR toy of a “pencil” that doodles in thin air, which is certainly interesting... though I’m not sure how well it generalizes to more abstract user interfaces. If you’re using such a system, you have to constantly rotate the object you’re drawing, and/or move your body around, in order to properly perceive the object in 3D. This is kind of a pain. If your primary goal is to create a 3D object, it’s an unavoidable pain and the benefit is well worth it; but if what you’re interacting with is just an abstract interface meant to manipulate something non-spatial, it’s probably better to avoid.

kragen 7y ago
> both of those rely on feeling a 3D object with your hands, which partially bypasses the 2D limitation of vision, but isn’t yet possible to emulate in VR. That's the entire point of the comment you're responding to and the reason for Dynamicland.
- comex 7y ago
  If so, it was off topic. John Carmack's post was about VR interfaces, and I interpreted the parent comment in that context. In any case, I would contest that bypassing the limitations of vision, specifically, represents a significant part of the reason for Dynamicland.
  - kragen 7y ago
    If you "would contest" that, it's because you still haven't read the essay that was linked in the putatively off-topic comment you were "responding" to, after eight years. And, yeah, you could try to redefine "VR" and even "3D interfaces" (the actual topic) as being strictly limited to "binocular video responding to a head tracker", but even "VR" researchers have been researching haptic and kinesthetic feedback from a zillion angles for a lot more than eight years, so I don't think it's off-topic at all.

hinkley 7y ago

A keyboard is also a 3D interface with one dimension constrained. I have to be able to move my hand past the keyboard without accidentally inputting data. You can see the problems of this kind when you have a large touch screen and people try to gesture at it while talking and end up accidentally changing something. Look at machine rooms in submarines or control rooms for power plants or tv studios. Different tasks are in different locations sure, but the inputs are constrained to an area near the arc defined by the fingers at a comfortable distance from the shoulder. For really good reasons.

aaron695 7y ago

> A pencil is a 3D interface. A pencil is 2D or less, it can't move on a third axis, a good example of why 3D is worse (Ever seen someone using the rare 3Dish pencils?)