The ‘Cube’ is an attempt to use 3D user interface to replace the 2D windows desktop. (The website contains explanations, features, details, and screenshots/videos.) It supports conventional applications (which use 2D win32 GUI) smoothly into 3D objects. The work space is a ’round’ room, user can roam inside the room, place 3D objects on ceiling, floor or the walls. User can move, rotate and trigger event on objects. And there is a ‘Species Launcher’ which is the 3D version of ‘start menu’. User can open tree structured menu items level by level, and there is a history of levels, user can fall back to a previous opened level.
An attempt of 3D user interface for Windows
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Oh joy. Another developer who thinks perspective text is fun to stare at all day.
On the plus side we now have another method to reject in the search for a new desktop paradigm.
Next please, eventually we might reach one that’s actually useful.
a whole lot like suns project looking glass.
And a whole lot like Microsofts projects Task Gallery
http://research.microsoft.com/ui/TaskGallery/
I predict all attempts at 3D desktop interfaces will fail… and suck really really bad, too.
Why do people keep trying this?
I dont see an immediate need for a 3D desktop, more just eye candy, and so far, it really hasn’t even achieved that.
I agree that I don’t see the point in 3D desktops, but some of the comments are a bit harsh. Why not try to make reasonably constructive comments instead of venting on a public board.
I personally would like to see big improvements with 2D desktops before people start making even more complicated. Currently when I want to focus a currently running application there are still many inconsistencies. Look at Windows XP for example, I can select some running applications in the task bar, yet some are placed near the clock out of the way and depend on their own method of opening/focusing and accessing. Also one has the Alt-Tab method which is probably one of the most conceptually simple and elegant however it requires the user to press down two keys in addition to navigating what is shown by either using the mouse to select or pressing the Tab button some more. It would be nice if the Alt-Tab window would just stay open until it is closed or a program is chosen. I think I heard Gnome or KDE just starting doing this.
Another problem is showing complete titles of application windows in the task bar and other places. Showing text when hovering the mouse over something is a start but this is inconsistent and buggy. Sometimes for example my clock text that shows the date won’t pop up. It’s little things like that which really disappoint me while I’m using a computer. In Gnome I tried to solve this problem by adding a vertical panel to the left size of my screen with a task-bar. The idea was to show the tasks stacked vertically so that increasing the size of the panel would allow to see longer titles. Well it looks like the Gnome Panel has a maximum size of NOT-BIG-ENOUGH.
Having icons on the task bar with no explanation of what makes them different. Many people say something like “I click over here to get to AIM” but they have no concept of what is running on their computer at the time. To them there is no difference between going to AIM under the start menu to open the program, using the “quick launch” icon or other icons in the “notification area”.
Resolution independent desktops and applications would be real nice.
These are just some example of problems that I still see with many desktop environments which are all entirely solvable without turning to 3D. It’s possible that 3D features may make the user experience more inviting or usable but spinning and twirling windows and stuff doesn’t seem to make much sense unless you could use your hands instead of a mouse. Useful 3D concepts are shading of windows and other elements to better illustrate layering and spatial depth, sinking or pulling application windows to change their depth while managing multiple windows, and probably a few more tricks that would be simple to implement and much more powerful than things like Suns project looking glass.
You should never experiment with new things no matter how useful they may be…
“I see no advantage whatsoever to the graphical user interface.” (Bill Gates, 1983)
// p.s. defcon 12 was fun
The reason a 3d interface is not working is because our interaction with the computer is via tools that were designed for a 2d environment (kb,mouse). When CLI was all we had, we used a keyboard. When GUI became pervasive, so did the mouse. If 3d is going to catch on, there will need to be an interface that can best manipulate 3d objects.
Unfortunately, I suspect joint hardware development/software development is one area where open source is less equiped than their propriatary counterparts.
Neat, cool, wow! Unfortunately it adds no practical benefit to *using* a computer.
3D interfaces are unnecessary. Just like how it takes MORE effort to use a VR glove or headset, a 3D interface adds an extra level of work to get the same job done.
Why not?
Great! I love it. My ball mouse makes this really fun
“The reason a 3d interface is not working is because our interaction with the computer is via tools that were designed for a 2d environment (kb,mouse). When CLI was all we had, we used a keyboard. When GUI became pervasive, so did the mouse. If 3d is going to catch on, there will need to be an interface that can best manipulate 3d objects.”
I’m trying to imagine, if I had a perfect 3D input device… even a 3D holographic display for it… how could this work? It must be my lack of an imagination. I still don’t see this as a good thing.
Where is the advantage?
It will just slow down work, slow down the computer, help you lose what you want to find, and make most everything you work with (2D images/text) very much out of place.
with that sort of interface.
…but the fact that they “removed” the standard Windows taskbar would definitely make using The Cube a pain in the ass. The thing I find the neatest about it is the ability to tile and snap windows to different positions in the world – using that sort of approach makes it easy to monitor more than one window without actually having to have’em in focus. There are times when you just have to keep an eye on something without having to stare directly at it, y’know?
I agree, but I think the “perfect input device” might be something which doesn’t require the use of your hands or fingers at all. i.e, neurological sensors which immediately fetch and display data as your mind decides that it would like to see something. In this scenario, a 3D UI or method of displaying data could be ideal.
Dish 3d, go for 4d. Nay, dish 4d, go for 5d.
The problem with current 3d attempts is that they keep using a 2d interface (the screen). If you stop to think that the mouse is just a proxy for your fingertips, then the whole 3d thing starts to make more sense. However, mice give greater precision than fingers and fit where the latter can’t, so until terrific new hardware is *invented* (not simply ‘developed’), 3d endeavours are unfocused and useless.
Where is the damn download ?
A big fat bronx cheer to the doubters! Personally, it’d be great if we all could get to work on a horse, a lot cleaner too! And I haven’t gotten around to buying one of those digital watches either, they’ll never beat a Swiss made watch! inline skates? what’s rong with rollerskates and disco music???? To all the people who fly in those jet aeroplane’s, are you nuts? My rotary dial phone and 1400 baud rate dial up still smoke on my 286 pc, thanks tandy corp!
All sarcasm aside, I applaud anyone who “thinks outside the bun!!” Most people are correct when saying it feels different, or is flawed one way or another. To be expected realy, it’s new. Hardware will quickly catch up , and within short order we’ll all wonder how they did it in the old days. Progress… I’m also one of those many who struggles to ” keep up” I never got a computer until I was 23 , now I’m 38 and feeling blown away more every day by what these “machines” can do.
My 2 cent’s ? When we loose the monitor, and keyboard, and mouse, 3d will have arrived. I don’t know about you folks, but dragging around a notebook, or sitting at a desk is getting old already. Wasn’t the idea of computing supposed to make life easier, smarter, better? Right now all I see is more complexity in 2d land, but 3d land looks alot more like freedom. I’m thinking implants to the nueral cortex to enhance our already ample computer that we were born with! Think of it, computing anytime, anywhere. O.k maybe I shouldn’t watch star trek and post here ( darn borg episode’s!)
Unlike jets and electricity, 3d desktops will be one of the many inventions people don’t hear about in history–because they sucked.
I’m not an anti-progress conservative. Implants or Star Trek like voice interfaces are good ideas. But they might actually work and be useful.
So many are so quick to dismiss 3D UI because it doesn’t work for them. But it can be used for certain situations, maybe not for every day computing but other tasks. Take say, working with hazardous materials. One would rather send in a robotic device that then transmits the data back into a manipulatable 3D UI for a human user to be able to examine, and work on from a distance. Rather than inputing commands into a computer for the robot to do, the human is actually manipulating the robot based on this 3D display of said hazardous material.
Keep in mind this is just one rather vague example of a single application for a 3D UI.
All you have to do is think about it for a minute.
People always like to put down the dreamers, saying they are stupid, that’s a bad idea, etc… really, you should encourage such dreaming.
I agree that they need to keep researching the 3D GUI, but I also agree that current 3D GUIs suck and don’t allow the user to do any useful work easier. That’s what it comes down to in the end – does it make the computer easier to use? Given Looking Glass and this thing, the answer is currently NO. It won’t always be no if people keep working on it. Someone will eventually (probably through trial and error) work out the best way to do a 3D GUI.
You example of remotely controlling a robot is different. In that example that you need to see “real life” you put a camera on the robot and control it with a remote.
Not like what the robot sees is going to be input to a terminal and you will type back at it “mov axis 5 to pos 23 @ speed 21 while arm y move axis Q and hand pressure 72”
I am not saying there will never ever be a use for a 3D desktop, just that the example you gave “cleaning materials with a robot” is not closely related with how PC’s are used today “typing and reading, mostly”
And about dreamers, this is an idea that has been done by Sun with looking glass, Microsoft Task Gallery and bob, Sphere XP, 3DNA and others.
3DNA is mostly a rip-off of Task Gallery that you can download and run today
http://www.3dna.net/products/loft.htm
I don’t remember how long ago it was, but I think it was PC gamer that used to have free demo games with magazines, they offered a 3D application that was used to manage your collection of demo games. If you want to date it, it was back when I first played the original “Heroes of Might and Magic” (great game BTW)
So anyway, this is a cool project for school, I hope he got an A.
No, time to tune back a few years to Web Forager (Xerox Parc) @ http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/web_forager_large.jpg
Both of the above are inspired by this and others which came before them. I love how some clowns would have us believe they have found the holy desktop productivity grail — these are not revolutionary, people.
There is a reason they did not catch on – angled planes of text are not useful (who reads a book at a 45 degree angle), and interacting in 3d space is more time consuming than 2d windows. Leave the 3d view where it belongs on the desktop — inside a 2d window, for applications that need it.
dacloo is right in that the so called 3d interfaces we see mockups of these days just display the current desktop in a slightly different way.
I wouldn’t want to have the 2d window I work with displayed in perspective like these projects do. This just makes it harder to work with, and I think people are right in rejecting the idea. At least for web browsers, text editors, and other traditional apps.
I believe, however, that it could be useful to stack windows you don’t work with at the moment similar to the ones at the lower left hand in this shot:
http://landau.rice.edu/~fei/i3/images/screenshots/work1.jpg
Currently, MacOS X is the only system that has a suitable display system for this, though. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Apple suddenly made all the critics go, wow, by implementing this. On the other hand, it might introduce too much clutter (a second (or is that third?) way to minimize windows) for them to consider it.
fortunately the makers of great 3D games didn’t wait for a “real” 3D interface.
Here is something similar but looks more realistic to me:
http://www.3dna.net/products/loft.htm
I can’t help but think how wrong this is. Windows are inherently 2D objects. 3D technologies are perfectly useful in games and whatnot, but on a desktop, oh puh-lease.
How is it at all useful to be able to tilt/rotate/whatever a window? When it’s turned to an absurd angle you can’t use it (unless you enjoy reading upside down and rotated text). Of course that’s not the idea behind it, no, the idea is being able to group windows together intelligently .. Right. If I want to group windows together in an intelligent fashion I’ll put my text editors on one virtual desktop and my porn on another. That’s intelligent grouping. Not this 3D nonsense. It’s a waste of CPU cycles, memory and in the programmer’s case: keystrokes.
I, for one, think that this is a great idea.
No more having to use several desktops (which is tiresome), and even a smallish resolution can have many windows open at once.
Not only is it eye candy, but useful as all hell. I’d love to get rid of taskbars, and have a GUI like this.
I don’t know what’s up with everyone. It’s not like the guy’s torturing guinee pigs to make his 3d desktop. You can’t read slanted text. True, and you can’t use a minimized window either. It’s more work than a 2d desktop. Also true. I don’t want to have to rotate, scale and translate my view manually to find the application I want, but you’ve got to walk before you can run and right now we can’t even crawl.
All I want from an application manager is to be able to load apps, to sitch between running apps and, just occasionally, to view two different apps at once. Windows isn’t great at this and I see no reason why 3d should be any worse.
Things only get interesting when application developers start to take advantage of the 3d desktop. Running 2d apps in a 3d environment is like using windows to run command line shells. That doesn’t mean 3d is a dead end.
3dna….
Be aware, demo I tried came with a spyware browser toolbar
See Dacloo’s post.
I agree with the 3d haters. I think we’ve come to a perfect point in desktop technological advances where we should stop and not push the limits anymore. In fact, I suspect we really don’t need the 2d envirnment as much as we think. Why, there are thousands of people on Linux now who only use the GUI for a limited amount of tasks. Sheesh, if some of you people were in Linus Torvalds dorm room years ago and looked over his shoulder you’d probably curse him for even trying a stupid thing like trying to build an OS….what was he thinking?!?!?
All these 3d environments are test beds for tomorrows technology. Some of you already use programs to view 3d data in DBs or geographical applications. With all the different kinds of information and metadata we need, at some point someone will figure out how to represent a 3d desktop environment in ways that we want it. In the meantime, keep calling them stupid and useless – they probably don’t mind.
this is a duplicate story on osnews, check the archives.
What I want to know is, will you have to wear those silly red and cyan glasses to use it, like the old-fashioned 3D movies? 🙂
… I’ll wait for the interface shown in the movie “Minority Report” before I reckon we’ll need 3d <g>
Why do we need this? They made the nfreaken desktop round, that is dumb. Fix the holes MS, windows needs to be a secure os. Not a “eye candy” os.
But in a recent OSNews item (last month I think) about this guy’s blog on how to make 3D interfaces, my gripe with the 3D desktop paradigm was that the information we use on the computer desktop does not inherently demand a 3D visualization, the way information in, say, a CAD program, demands explicitely 3D manipulation. Sadly so far, most 3D interfaces are nothing more than a container for 2D objects. While I’m not cynical about the possibility of using 3D (on a 2D screen) for good uses, I find that the UI reflexion has not gone low-level enough to find what would be the good purpose of the technology. My hunch is that one has to start bottom-up , and study the nature of information one wants to visualize in order to come up with a good interface. Reading http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0961392118/002-016335… by Edward Tufte might help too
The reason a 3d interface is not working is because our interaction with the computer is via tools that were designed for a 2d environment (kb,mouse). When CLI was all we had, we used a keyboard. When GUI became pervasive, so did the mouse. If 3d is going to catch on, there will need to be an interface that can best manipulate 3d objects.
I was going to post this, but…it’s already here.
If there was an input device that would allow for 3D movement of a “cursor” or whatever, the 3d interface would rock.
It might necessitate better output (imporved monitors) to usefully display a 3d interface.
There’s the rub – we don’t use 3D displays. No matter how you look at it, we use 2D displays. Any “3D” on your screen is just a projection of 3D into 2D. That’s what “3D” processors do for crying out loud – project 3D objects into 2D and update the 2D display frame.
This 2D projection limits the usefulness of 3D in current systems. Until 3D displays become common, 2D interfaces will always prove superior to 3D interfaces.
Look at it this way – what is the most common complaint about the 3D GUI in nearly all previous comments? You cannot read text in a rotated window very well. In a 3D display, you’d just move a little to the side and look at that rotated window straight on to read it. You can’t do that with a 2D projection.
i think that one should ditch the desktop idea compleatly. rather we should look towards projects like haystack. the current taskbar is wrongly named, it should be named the app bar.
a true taskbar should be vertical as it gives more room for information. say i start a download, then it should compleatly “hide” in the taskbar as a task containing all the info of the download url and filename, speed and a loadbar. this way i dont have to click on it to check progress. same with a rendering, i start it and it will go hide in the taskbar with a progress bar and a project name.
basicly the taskbar have to become more then just a container for the apps in current use, it have to become truely task oriented and a infocenter (maybe thats where windows is heading with the sidebar, but im not sure as it right now looks more like a extended systray).
and all tasks should be maximized from start, and only if the user need to look at two documents at the same time (for visual comparison or similar.) should one split the display (yes split) so that one document is below the other, or maybe side by side, look at ion for linux or the windosizer system for windows. the idea of floating windows have to go.
if a popup comes up it should present itself in the tasks box in the taskbar rather then as a floating window. and it should not steal focus what so ever! it should have a highlight/blink/attention grabber yes and all input should lock but it should not get focus. this way you know that when the task stops responding look in the taskbar for more info.
anyone interested in helping me see this become reality? personaly i would like to put this on top of *nix, be it *bsd, linux or anything else similar. the problem then becomes backwards compatiblity tho…