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From: Bill Kearney [mailto:wkearney@ideaspace.net]
>I'd argue that for disconnected communications 3D has been impossible. In
>face-to-face communication, however, 3D plays a much larger role. If just
from
>the perspective of gestures and other physical cues.
Which is why there has been a lot of research into systems for coding the
gestural
and other human-centric information for transformation into 3D
representations.
It opens a very big can o' data responsibilities but it isn't undoable and
could
be one of the more useful applications of semantic web technology. This is
also
one where composable libraries have to play a role. Not oddly, one of the
HumanML
members is working that from the aspect of museums, AnthML and so on.
>That current CMC tools have no ability to exchange 3D data says more
negative
>things about the tools than the lack of value of 3D data. It's quite
accurate
>to say existing tools have contributed to learned behavior. I'm not sure
that
>justification for not using 3D visualization tools.
It is simply important to visualize a 3D thing, not just create amorphous
shapes for data viz as some systems do. In short, 3D suffers from a lack
of well-accepted metaphors, the tropes or semiotic systems of a 3D content
language.
One thing 3D is fairly bad at is displaying lots of readable text, not that
it
can't but just that are cheaper ways to get that done. What 3D does well is
provide viewpoints as icons in both the physical display and in the sense
that
an icon indexes a lot of data. When that icon is animatible, it is like
having
a dynamic superquery that is very easy for the user to manage as long as
what
it views is recognizable. Consider that the main complaint of non-wizard
QBE
interfaces is the 'lost in space' phenomena which is why the web is so
reliant
on Back and Next. One can do that with viewpoints to but one can also make
the
move virtually continuous instead of discrete, and because of interpolation,
one
can move to a new point of view without changing the viewpoint.
>I'm not arguing one over the other here, just pointing out that just
because the
>tools people have now doesn't mean they wouldn't use others if they
developed.
The tools exist. The sign systems don't in the general population. Even
though
a 3D street sign for curves can be more informative, they aren't that
useful. For
single point of information displays, 3D isn't always that useful. For
continuous
dynamic spatio/temporal information, they can be.
>What I have found is that very few populations of users see 3D data
>visualizations in the same way. Some folks 'get it' while others do not.
Smiling faces work in every known culture. One doesn't need 3D to display
those,
but is is easy to do. Again, it is an issue of a semiotic for real time 3D.
len
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