To 3D, or not to 3D, that is the question. ..

Shakespeare may well have written:

To 3D, or not to 3D, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the set top to suffer
The spins and zooms of outrageous interfaces,
Or to take arms against a sea of dimensions
And by opposing end them.

The first consumer PC graphics cards were introduced in 1995. Previous to that for a good ten years, 3D was available on workstations such as those from IBM, SUN or best known at the time, Silicon Graphics. By 1995 OpenGL was well established (being based on the existing IrisGL from SGI) and with the exception of shaders, little has changed in the graphics world since.

Yet, 15 years later the user interface of Windows from Microsoft and, more telling perhaps, the user interface from Apple remain solidly 2D and we remain with interfaces like the one below:



In the early days of 3D, of course, there were many attempts to bring 3D interfaces to the desktop. PC shows looked very similar to set top box shows of today with a dozen 3D metaphors for licensing/sale. I particularly liked the messy bedroom metaphor. The idea was that your interface was a bedroom (or a house) and you left files, well, wherever, under the bed, next to the cat, on the TV. The claim was that you could more easily remember leaving your notes next to the cat than you could remember leaving them in /usr/ct/home/private/expenses/trips/florida. It never caught on.

One arguably successful user interface in 3D was seen briefly in the film Jurassic Park, running on an SGI. The young Lex sits down, pulls up FSN (File System Navigator) and declares that she knows this system, its Unix. Here is a shot of FSN, which was shipped with every SGI machine (not every Unix machine ;-) ).



It was a file searching utility and genuinely useful. The user saw a landscape of files and could easily find large files or large collections of files or new files (colour) or combinations. It presents far more information than a traditional windowing system can and removes the need to navigate the tree of files, allowing the user to jump to interesting directories simply by clicking on something in the distance.

Useful it may be, but pretty, it isn't.

Another successful 3D interface in the sea of unsuccessful ones is CoolIris. Though many would claim it is barely 3D at all, it presents a wall of images which can be examined and scrolled quickly. The user can very quickly find through visual queues an image in the distance that would otherwise take many clicks to find in a 2D paged scheme. Here is an image:



Again, like FSN, the interface presents information in the distance that a 2D windowed interface would fail to present at all. Again its not generally useful but useful for a specific type of data. However, it is well designed. A video is available on the website or you can download it and install in Firefox.

This is key I think, for the first time in history, with FLASH 10, designers of user interfaces have access to 3D technology and can experiment freely without recourse to programming. So perhaps the technology has not changed much but the useability has. The power is coming into the right hands (after 15 years).

We will see some experimentation at first. Whitevoid, who created Liquid user interface for Rovi, have an interesting 3D portfolio at their website. Meanwhile over at EcoZoo, it gets wilder. Ecozoo illustrates that a 3D interface based on a 3d world metaphor can work but also that it is much slower to navigate and less intuitive. Such interfaces will fail because they do not add to the user experience but subtract from it. Again I'm reminded of the early 3D world for PCs and workstations. The real question is can designers help create a generation of 3D interfaces that are genuinely useful?

Here are some golden rules that I made up for 3D interfaces to succeed. Thornborrows golden rules of 3D interfaces:

1. Use 3d only when it presents more information more quickly than 2d
2. Simplify the 3D as much as possible without breaking rule 1
3. Relevant (focused) information should be "close" to the user
   
4. Present textual information in 2D, not 3D
   
5. Only have supporting visuals such as images and visual cues in 3D
6. Never force the user to navigate freely a 3D world but instead use 2D control metaphors
   
7. Short highlight effects and transitions are ideal for 3D
8. Make it as fast as possible: the performance of 3D needed for a good experience is high