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Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:13:11 -0400
From: Reed Hedges <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: [vos-d] a 3D interface vision
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Toni, if you haven't already, you can join the mailing list here 
<http://interreality.org/lists>, and I won't have to approve future posts :)


Here are some things that I though of while reading. Maybe I'll digest it 
further and post more later.  There are lots of things to think about!


Quoting Toni Alatalo <address@hidden>:
> > We live in a three-dimensional world.  We think in terms of spacial
> > relations: that one thing is next to another, what room something is
> > in, or how far apart two places are.  For example, there is a mnemonic
> 
> interesting that you go to spac-/spatiality (i'm more used to the 

It seems that "spatiality" is the spelling that we all have in common.


> 2. Sense of space and direction (related to orientation) has been 
> discussed when making views to information structures.
> 
> The latter is partly related to how ZigZag


More on ZigZag is here for those who don't know about it: 
http://www.xanadu.net/zigzag/

I confess that I haven't fully wrapped my head around it yet!


> Oh, a general (philosophical?) note about the beginning sentence: you 
> may say that we live in a 3d world, but don't we also live in social 
> and mental (conceptual) worlds that have quite different structures 
> than being points in a xyz coordinate system 


Ah, true. And a problem with trying to map fuzzy idea things -> physical 
spaces.  But of course we can play with that mapping.  

So we think about spatial things: what are the ways to walk from my house to 
the market? Where did I leave my car keys? :)  We also think about non spatial 
things, but think about them in a spatial way:  what are the citations in this 
paper; what is the structure of my family tree.  The first (paper citaiton) is 
a mapping from hypertext to a spatial metaphor maybe.  (See Shum, Simon (HCI 
group, Dept. Psych, Un. York), "Real and virtual spaces: mapping from spatial 
cognition to hypertext" in _Hypermedia_ Taylor Graham, London, 1990 2(2) pp 133-
158.  It's on line somewhere too.  I have notes on that paper somewhere if you 
want them as well)

Maybe, like ZigZag, we need ways for the user to play with the view of the 
structure: choose different mappings to the screen.  Is this hard to do in the 
general case?  Or are task-specific solutions better?


> > trick called "Memory Palace"

Best book I've seen so far on this is "The Art of Memory" by Francis Yates.  U. 
Chicago Press, 1966.   Here is a good introductory artical as well: 
<http://mappa.mundi.net/cartography/Palace/>.   Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the 
Lambs books & movies) uses a memory palace to remember where his victims live.




> but, unlike in the physical 3d, nearness need 
> not be the distance of two objects in a 3d space, but can be defined 
> and dealt with by using other kind of relations, too. 


One way to represent the nearness of two concepts is by placing symbols for 
them in a space (2d,3d,whatever).  There are other ways to visualize and work 
with them too, e.g. color or hyperlink or footnote.  I would like to explore 
using color more in the future.  

You are right to point out that representing conceptual nearness by using 
static spatial nearness has its limitations.


> http://an.org/gzz/screenshot-gzigzag-abc.png 

How usable is this? Do users "get" it?  What do you use to control the 
switching of views?

> RDF
>
> a-b-c
> 
> a-c-b

I guess you could draw C and B twice, or try to draw all the edges.


[Syncronocity side note: here is an interesting note I was just reading from 
Edsger Dijkstra about visualizing mathematical things with pictures (he doesn't 
like it): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd06xx/EWD696.PDF ]


> hm. so? i guess the thing is that i don't know what happens with 
> spatiality.. will need to let this 'stew' a bit

[... Or ponder: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD473.PDF ]




> >  Hierarchical filesystems are the prevailing method for
> > storing and organizing information, but they are not particularly
> > intuitive and describing nested directories as a
> > folder-within-a-folder-within-a-folder stretches the metaphor quite
> 

And not only is deep nesting confusing, but the hierarchy is limiting. (As all 
Xanadu fans are well aware :)

Rumor has it that future versions of Windows will use more database-query kinds 
of filesystem interfaces.

IIRC BeOS did something like that too?



> for example, in FenPDF 
...
> just the articles 
> and paper notes (canvases) floating around, structured by the 
> connections the user makes


And if you want to make directories and nested hierarchies, I assume that that 
is completely possible.  You don't want to rule out that possibility for things 
that genuinely do fit into a hierarchy.


> people may e.g. define their own relation types. in zigzag this is 
> about making new dimensions,

An interesting property of ZigZag it seems (though maybe I don't understand it) 
is to work within this multi-dimensional array paradigm, rather than floating 
objects with links.




> hm, i don't quite see how the shelves would work


The problem is that you run out of space in one dimension, so you add another 
to expand that space.  It simply gives you more room, really.  So to 
do "shelves" you just start moving your piles of stuff up into the air away 
from your main workspace, perhaps collapsed into a compact object representing 
the group (like closing a book with its many pages, and just using the title on 
the spine to reference it).




> 'I know this, this is UNIX!" and started working on it :)

Was that one from Jurassic Park?   

Imagine two versions of that scene: 

1. The girl sees the 3D filesystem, and is able to determine from the directory 
layout that it's Unix.  (You have /dev, you have /usr, etc.)  If it was DOS or 
VMS or something, you'd see a big list of disk names, you'd select one. Then 
you'd see the directory hierarchy for that disk.

2. The girl sees a prompt "trex:~%".  How do you know what OS it is? Well, it 
looks like a conventional Unix prompt.  But maybe it's something weird and the 
convention has been carried over. Maybe it's BeOS running a tcsh shell.  Maybe 
it's a subtle variant like Mac OSX.
  

Two very different ways of getting knowlege about the OS.  Both require special 
knowlege.  Does (1) allow you to grok it easier?  How much repeated "cd" 
and "ls" would be required with (2) to find out that the Jurassic Park security 
system is controlled by a program installed 
at "/usr/local/share/ParkSecurityPro95" with config files in "/etc/psp/95/conf" 
and etc. etc.    Would the time it takes to fly around it (1) be comparable?  
Which interface does the expert prefer?  




> all that is fine, but are there benefits in having the office as a 3d 
> space? i mean, for the user interface to resemble a physical space? us 
> being vague about the definition of 3d is probably a problem in this 
> discussion, hopefully the points get across anyhow.

There are benefits.  There are some drawbacks... are we identifying them 
enough?  One benefit is customization and personalizaiton: by that I simply 
mean that you have more space in 3D to waste putting pictures of your kids on 
the walls of your office, of having a window to look out of into some nice 
scenery-- or not.  Those are important cues for other people as well in 
identifying and using your personal spaces.   


My main interest in 3D spaces is collaboration.  Presence, I believe, is 
crucial to effective collaboration, and if you're present you need to be in 
some place.  It gets clumsy in 2D.  


> Tuomas (Fenfire lead developer) argues that that is exactly the problem 
> with 3D UI:s: they are difficult to interact with. In games it's ok 
> 'cause there things are supposed to be challenging, but for other 
> things they are clumsy. He thinks that perhaps with actual 3d displays, 
> very accurate ones, and sensitive&responsive data gloves etc. they 
> *might* be usable, but not with the current (nor foreseeable in the 
> near future?) technologies.
> 
> So again, why 3d objects, why in 3d space? It can be seen as too 
> restrictive:

...

> the note about the clutter is interesting also because it is related to 
> the counter-arguments against 3d interfaces that i should be coming at, 
> of which one is about placement on screen

Another disadvantage of 3D, I agree, on some reflection.  Clutter in 3D can in 
fact be as bad as 2D.  We do need to think about perspective and occlusion. 
Those things are important problems.



> this means 
> that even though there are already many things in a place, or near some 
> object, there need not be basically any limit to the amount of 
> additional things that can be there, too. 


But how do you draw that? (Or should we *not* draw it?)  How do you write it 
down in a form that makes the links more immediate and clear than RDF?
Is it possible?

> 
> We present Storm,

Storm is something like Freenet, where docs have unique id's that can be 
searched for?  I will have to check out that paper, sounds interesting.



reed


-- 
Reed Hedges
address@hidden
http://zerohour.net/~reed

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