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I've never really questioned what was going to take the desktop's place. 3D UI's have been created and honed in the game and Visual Effects industry for severa

I've never really questioned what was going to take the desktop's place. 3D UI's have been created and honed in the game and Visual Effects industry for several decades. It's only a matter of time before OS's start to make use of some of the metaphors that are standard in game UI's. I'd argue that the reason that they aren't popular now, is because we haven't had enough processing power on cheap, generic computers to make adding 3D elements to a UI worth while. When we all have 16, 32 or 64 cores, sitting under out desks waiting around for something interesting to do, it is going to make a lot more sense to include more animations, videos, composites and 3D elements into our UI's. 3D and graphics heavy UI's also answer the question of, "What can we possibly do with 64 cores on a CPU?" This question was answered long ago: render more video and more graphics. Gamers haven't tired of having more parallel processing units on their GPU's over the past 20 years. They get more processing power, they just crank up the triangle count in their models, turn particle rendering to "high" and set rail guns to "awesome". I have no doubt we'll be doing the same with our OS eye candy soon. I can't wait to use a CPU cycles for particle dynamics on my OS. :) As far as loosing the desktop metaphor == backwards compatibility problems... That's becoming a non-issue with virtualization. With virtualization, you can have backwards and cross platform compatability with pretty much any OS out there except for Apple OS's. <kvetch>Apple is the exception because they don't want you to play with their OS software unless you buy it with their hardware.</kvetch> It's good to thing about these things, though. Thanks for the article.

harpastum 18y ago
While I agree that animation is one very effective way to enhance user interaction [1], I don't believe that simply upping the pixel count or adding 3d visuals will make interfaces that much better. Compared to the late 90s, our current OSes focus an insane amount of their resources on eye candy. The newest UI fads (3d window switching, etc.) would make a windows 95 or Mac OS 9 user's head spin. Have they made the interaction metaphor better? Somewhat, but at nowhere near the pace of almost any other computer-related field. I think that the main thrust of the article is that there is a limit to the advantages to be gained from simple graphics acceleration, and we are quickly approaching it. We need a new paradigm, otherwise we'll just continue languishing in a world where menu chains (edit->tools->filters...) and "ribbons" (i.e. MS Office) are the norm. [1]http://watchingapple.com/2008/04/animation-from-cartoons-to-the-user-interface/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/04/animation-from-cartoons-to-...
arakyd 18y ago
You are smoking the crack, sir. Games do not have 3D UIs, they have 2D HUDs on 3D worlds, if they have 3D at all. 3D modeling software doesn't even have 3D UIs. Outside of a tiny number of specialized applications, 3D UIs are another Microsoft Bob. 3D has been tried, and it didn't fail for lack of computing power. There is absolutely no reason to navigate a 3D landscape to create your document, even a 3D document, or get to your email. The 3D interface that actually improves productivity has yet to be invented. What? Eye candy? Seriously? There's too much eye candy already. There are eleventy billion better things to do with multiple cores. If there aren't better things to do on your desktop, then you should be using a cheaper computer or running Folding@Home, or something. Anything. 3D is for art, not for UIs.
- likpok 18y ago
  3D UIs are not necessarily bad. They are not suited to a 2D display. Solve that problem and you might be able to implement an actual 3D UI.
  - jerf 18y ago
    The problem with 3D interfaces is not the 2D display. There are two major problems with 3D interfaces: Your best input devices are fundamentally 2D. Fully 3D interface devices exist but are unusual and generally tuned for a specific purpose. (Even if you want to jump up and say "The Wiimote!", from what I can see it is typically used in a 2D manner. Those 2D are not the conventional 90 degree angles(), mostly in a way to make them easier to use with wrists and arms, but it's still a lot of 2D motion with rare forays into true 3D that get old fast.) The other major problem is that full* 3D is virtually incomprehensible; we live in a 2.5D world. Try to train a "normal person" to play Descent. (If you think full-3D interfaces would be awesome, go play Descent to be sure!) We can't use the full 3D. What we can use is a 2.5D plane stretching out into the distance. But, as long as we're using 2.5D, why not place it perpendicular to our eyes and see the maximum area, instead the 3D-engine view that moves all but a very small part of the 2.5D plane out of our field of view and range of action? Fully 3D interfaces are fundamentally and deeply flawed. We've had the hardware to display them for at least a decade now and there's a reason there isn't even a halfway decent prototype... and it's not for lack of trying. It's just a really, really bad idea, one where you can't even overcome the fundamental flaws with brute force and ideology. (*): Recall that dimensionality is not constrained to the traditional three 90-degree rotated planes, it is a measurement of how many numbers need to be specified in a given situation. Hold out your arms and fingers straight, and move only your wrist around. As you move your wrist around, look at the surface defined by where the tip of your middle finger is. It is piece of a vaguely spherical shell which curves in 3D space, but is itself a 2D surface; given the situation I laid out I need only two numbers to identify a point on that plane. The Wiimote is capable of being used in full 3D and it certainly is in some cases, but the human body itself imposes constraints on how you move that thing around and full 3D gets tiring, fast. Even the ones that use full 3D still strike me as using 2.5D; a full 2D for the wrist motions, and .5D for just thrusting backwards or forwards with no meaningful wrist interactions (just serving as a tactile button). Another example: Using the Wiimote as a steering wheel, as nifty a use case as it is, actually cuts it down to 1D, as only the angle matters.

harpastum 18y ago

While I agree that animation is one very effective way to enhance user interaction [1], I don't believe that simply upping the pixel count or adding 3d visuals will make interfaces that much better. Compared to the late 90s, our current OSes focus an insane amount of their resources on eye candy. The newest UI fads (3d window switching, etc.) would make a windows 95 or Mac OS 9 user's head spin. Have they made the interaction metaphor better? Somewhat, but at nowhere near the pace of almost any other computer-related field. I think that the main thrust of the article is that there is a limit to the advantages to be gained from simple graphics acceleration, and we are quickly approaching it. We need a new paradigm, otherwise we'll just continue languishing in a world where menu chains (edit->tools->filters...) and "ribbons" (i.e. MS Office) are the norm. [1]http://watchingapple.com/2008/04/animation-from-cartoons-to-the-user-interface/ http://watchingapple.com/2008/04/animation-from-cartoons-to-...

arakyd 18y ago

You are smoking the crack, sir. Games do not have 3D UIs, they have 2D HUDs on 3D worlds, if they have 3D at all. 3D modeling software doesn't even have 3D UIs. Outside of a tiny number of specialized applications, 3D UIs are another Microsoft Bob. 3D has been tried, and it didn't fail for lack of computing power. There is absolutely no reason to navigate a 3D landscape to create your document, even a 3D document, or get to your email. The 3D interface that actually improves productivity has yet to be invented. What? Eye candy? Seriously? There's too much eye candy already. There are eleventy billion better things to do with multiple cores. If there aren't better things to do on your desktop, then you should be using a cheaper computer or running Folding@Home, or something. Anything. 3D is for art, not for UIs.

likpok 18y ago
3D UIs are not necessarily bad. They are not suited to a 2D display. Solve that problem and you might be able to implement an actual 3D UI.
- jerf 18y ago
  The problem with 3D interfaces is not the 2D display. There are two major problems with 3D interfaces: Your best input devices are fundamentally 2D. Fully 3D interface devices exist but are unusual and generally tuned for a specific purpose. (Even if you want to jump up and say "The Wiimote!", from what I can see it is typically used in a 2D manner. Those 2D are not the conventional 90 degree angles(), mostly in a way to make them easier to use with wrists and arms, but it's still a lot of 2D motion with rare forays into true 3D that get old fast.) The other major problem is that full* 3D is virtually incomprehensible; we live in a 2.5D world. Try to train a "normal person" to play Descent. (If you think full-3D interfaces would be awesome, go play Descent to be sure!) We can't use the full 3D. What we can use is a 2.5D plane stretching out into the distance. But, as long as we're using 2.5D, why not place it perpendicular to our eyes and see the maximum area, instead the 3D-engine view that moves all but a very small part of the 2.5D plane out of our field of view and range of action? Fully 3D interfaces are fundamentally and deeply flawed. We've had the hardware to display them for at least a decade now and there's a reason there isn't even a halfway decent prototype... and it's not for lack of trying. It's just a really, really bad idea, one where you can't even overcome the fundamental flaws with brute force and ideology. (*): Recall that dimensionality is not constrained to the traditional three 90-degree rotated planes, it is a measurement of how many numbers need to be specified in a given situation. Hold out your arms and fingers straight, and move only your wrist around. As you move your wrist around, look at the surface defined by where the tip of your middle finger is. It is piece of a vaguely spherical shell which curves in 3D space, but is itself a 2D surface; given the situation I laid out I need only two numbers to identify a point on that plane. The Wiimote is capable of being used in full 3D and it certainly is in some cases, but the human body itself imposes constraints on how you move that thing around and full 3D gets tiring, fast. Even the ones that use full 3D still strike me as using 2.5D; a full 2D for the wrist motions, and .5D for just thrusting backwards or forwards with no meaningful wrist interactions (just serving as a tactile button). Another example: Using the Wiimote as a steering wheel, as nifty a use case as it is, actually cuts it down to 1D, as only the angle matters.