Re: The State Of The Art

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>>  Also, if you're going to have freedom of movement in three dimensions you
>> have the possibility of windows ending up upside down (spin 180 degrees
>> horizontally, then 180 degrees vertically... you're back where you started
>> but the other way up).
>
>I think the best way to combat this would be to have the sphere move
>around, but you always facing forward. Then have 4 globes (up, down,
>left, right) to serve as navigation.

 I don't see how this solves the problem. Try it using a hot cup of coffee to 
represent the window.  :)

>I cannot help but wonder as to the reasons why the flat desktop metaphor
>is so outdated, other than "It's been around for sooo long now" and
>"Can't I get a bit more grant money to study the problem?" :-)
>
>The flat, virtual desktop metaphor is perfectly suited to the flat
>monitor. "Imagine that your desktop is actually 6' diagonally. You can
>only see 19" of it. You slide it around to see other parts of it, and
>this thing right here called a pager lets you see what's out of the
>primary view.

 The problem is that if you had a 6' desk, you wouldn't use all of it - you'd 
have papers stacked several layers deep near the centre, and the corners 
would be pretty much empty, especially if you could only see 19" of your
desk at a time. The same happens with windows - instead of defining a huge 
desktop and using all of it, most people define a small desktop and keep it 
very cluttered. Unless you can make moving around the desktop as easy as 
casting your eyes around the screen, I don't see how this can be avoided.

 3D games show that treating a flat screen as a viewport into a 3D space is
much more immersive than treating it as a flat surface onto which flat
objects are placed. The trick is going to be creating that immersion without
the huge overheads of a 3D game engine.

>The multiple desktop metaphor is also well suited -- imagine you have 5
>monitors lined up on a conveyor. By clicking this thing that shows you
>what's on every monitor, you move the conveyor to the monitor you want.

 Again, you wouldn't in practice find five desks on a conveyor very useful -
the temptation would be to do as much work as possible on one desk, and use
the others for storing things you didn't need very often. Without a research
grant to back me up, I can only say that I suspect this is what most people 
do with multiple desktops.


Michael Rogers