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I don't know if it is wiring. I am told we are wired for
3D but that the expense of representation is high so we
long ago enculturated by technology, the 2D representations, and
now we hang on to that technology by habit and market force. It's hard to
say because cheap ubiquitous virtual 3D is new to our species. My
children love 3D and hate 2D representations of lessons and games.
They would much rather play Star Wars than Myst.
Beyond entertainment, successful applications often have training in common
or analysis where the 3D visual perspective makes immediate
apprehension possible. I'm not sure if anyone has taken
Tufte and 3D to task seriously, so opinions are welcome. One
I do know; to get serious complex work done, composable
model libraries are a must.
I read a post a week or so ago in which the author, a NIST
employee, said that if he saw one more "visualization of the
web" demonstration, he was going to scream. Somehow these
city block metaphors of the web don't work for some people.
They'd rather google and hunt a bit it seems, although as
an aside, that 'weapons of mass destruction' page is a
pretty good demonstration of gaming google (if you haven't
seen it, type that into the google search box).
Anyway
http://www.movesinstitute.org/xmsf/XmsfWorkshopSymposiumReportOctober2002.pd
f
will explain some of what motivates the question. I am
interested in opinions on how well REST can support these
requirements. There are strategies for working with the
latency of the network, but will REST exacerbate that? Is
this the case where XML-RPC is a better solution?
Real time 3D has a way of proofing certain well-held
notions of XML and the web architecture. It may be as
one speaker said, the next killer app, but at this time,
it is still a toy in most application domains. As Didier
points out, toys have a way of becoming tools.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Jelliffe [mailto:ricko@allette.com.au]
From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>
> >From a different perspective (pun intended) not everyone has the same
> >visualization skills.
>
> Yes. It would be interesting to see if Tufte applies.
I don't know if we even need to go as far as Tufte: Ben Schneiderman's
"direct manipulation" ideas will probably do. You want your interface to
present actions tightly bound to the objects that the user is interested in:
this is why IMHO the underlined links in webpages are successful:
the object of interest is the phrase and the action is directly linked to
it.
When we don't have computers, we rarely make 3D communications:
globes, anatomical models, and pop-up books are pretty rare and specific.
So 3D seems good for modelling 3D artifacts, but humans have never
taken it up for communication (except to try to represent multi-access
data, and even then often the needs of precision eventually overweigh
the joys of perspective and the visualation gets flattened). Even things
like transparent pages in books to allow layered diagrams are really just
2.5D.
I wonder how much of this is hardwired? If we were wired differently,
so that we preferred 3D to 2D, would our lecture theatres have, instead
of the flat whiteboard, mechanical arms with great reach and several
degrees of freedom, so that lecturers can put their 3D teaching artifacts
on them, allowing placment of the objects in 3D around the lecture
theatre? That we don't do that kind of thing suggests not a lack of
imagination or finance, but that it is not the way we usually communicate
(perhaps even if only because the theatricality swamps the communication.)
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