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| Visualizing Email Traffic and Content |
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posted by Editor
on Saturday March 29, @09:31PM
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| Are Users Finally Ready For 3D Browsing? |
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posted by Editor
on Friday March 14, @12:21AM
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This New York Times article explores the possibility that users are ready to embrace interfaces that let them directly control objects in a 3D space on their screen, blending 3D representations of content with physics software to produce visually stimulating experiences. A number of consumer offerings are now appearing that are designed to exploit immersive 3D environments to make viewing large numbers of web pages, videos, and pictures more efficient. The article features PicLens, a FireFox plugin that transforms the browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for viewing images on the web. With PicLens, arrays of photos are brought to life via a cinematic presentation that extends beyond the confines of the traditional browser window, using an interactive "3D Wall" allowing users to drag, click, and zoom their way around a wall of pictures (see screenshot).
A company not mentioned in the article is SpaceTime, which has just officially launched its SpaceTime 1.0 3D web browser. SpaceTime turns internet searches, YouTube videos, eBay listings and other web content into 3D elements that move around the screen (see YouTube demo). Another company called 3B offers a browser that allows users to take any collection of web sites or photos, and place them into a personalized 3D space called a 3B room (see screenshots). The question remains whether these tools truly make browsing more efficient, or are just eye-candy that will produce only a short-lived fit of interest before users return to their more familiar 2D point-and-click habits.
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| SpaceTime Introduces 3D Web Search Interface |
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posted by Editor
on Wednesday June 06, @05:19PM
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SpaceTime has announced the public beta release of their 3D search interface, which takes advantage of high powered graphics and fast broadband connections to enable users to visually search web sites for hundreds of items at a time. SpaceTime presents search result as a stack of separate images in a 3D space, which users can fly through to find what they are looking for (see screenshot). Each SpaceTime image shows a preview of the page pointed to by the search results, so that users can quickly see which page visually matches the content they seek. SpaceTime also keeps track of every search by cataloging it with icons on a "Timeline" located at the bottom of the program. Users can click on the Timeline icons to jump quickly between different searches (see User Guide). The program currently visualizes search results from Google and eBay, and the company plans to support additional web services in the future, including Amazon, YouTube, Email, MySpace, Music, and RSS feeds. SpaceTime runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista, and the beta can be downloaded for free here.
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| Bumptop Recreates Real-World Desktop Disorganization With 3D UI |
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posted by Editor
on Tuesday April 10, @06:50PM
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This article in MIT Technology Review highlights Bumptop, a 3D desktop that adds more realism to traditional GUIs by using a physics engine to simulate the behavior of desktop objects as they are dragged and tossed with the feel of characteristics such as friction, mass, collisions, and displacement (see this YouTube video for a demonstration). The idea is to allow users to employ the same strategies they use in the real world to organize their virtual desktops, making the interactive experience feel more continuous and analog (see this research paper describing the concept). The article points out that despite Bumptop's appeal, getting mass acceptance for a new user interface paradigm faces enormous hurdles, drawing comparisons with LifeStreams, another promising UI with a more intuitive metaphor that ultimately failed to gain traction in the market.
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| Paint The Virtual Air With Doodle 3D Drawing Tool |
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posted by Editor
on Monday February 19, @07:30PM
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Doodle is a prototype for a tool enabling direct drawing in 3D virtual space. It was designed by squidsoup to be used with the Flock of Birds motion tracking system from Ascension Technologies. The full 3D version allows for creation of drawn 3D shapes (spirals, swirls, faces, handwriting through to more complex objects), and was built as the basis for "drawn sound" and "drawn flora" projects, both still in progress. This online version (requires Shockwave) is more limited, and provides a good example of the challenge to reimplement a typical 2D interface-based application in 3D space. Playing around with the tool can become addicting, though.
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| 3DFM File System Manager Visualizes Directory Structures As Networks |
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posted by Editor
on Monday November 20, @06:14PM
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This article on linux.com reviews some 3D file system managers that are available for the Linux operating system. In addition to some of the better known file system visualizers like FSV and XCruiser, the article mentions a newer 3D file manager tool called 3DFM, which is written with OpenGL and supports customization of breadth, depth, and colors, as well as simple filtering capabilities. The article points out that 3DFM addresses a weakness of some existing file system visualizers, in which objects are sized proportionally to the volume of the files that they represent, cluttering the screen when directories are heavily populated. 3DFM alleviates visual congestion by organizing directories like a network, in which lines link directories with their parent directories like a spiderweb, making it easier to find directories that have many files (see screenshot).
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| Spectasia 3D Browser Eliminates Menus |
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posted by Editor
on Monday August 07, @06:52PM
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Alan Radley writes "Spectasia is a 3D user interface (UI) which organizes your desktop into a series of information galleries. Easy to use and fun to work with, Spectasia boosts the accessibility of content. It also frees you from the daily chore of having to memorize the names and/or locations of items on your computer. Explore our site (www.spectasia.com) to learn more about Spectasia." Spectasia attempts to improve the visibility of content and applications on Windows desktops by reducing the use of menus. (see screenshot). By using new cursor ergonomics and a "click stream memory", users can locate items in only 2-3 mouse move-clicks as opposed to 6-10 with the Windows start menu.
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| VisitorVille Represents Web Traffic As Virtual City |
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posted by Editor
on Wednesday June 21, @05:59PM
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VisitorVille uses a 3D virtual world interface for analyzing web traffic data. Rather than representing web site visitors as numbers or graphs, it visualizes traffic as real people in an urban environment. You can monitor your site traffic as if you were people-watching in a big city (see screenshots). Each web site is represented as a building and you can walk inside buildings to see who is visiting the site and initiate chats with them. Buses represent search engines, which deliver visitors to the web site. The interface requires authors to insert a snippet of code into their web pages.
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| Showcase Of 3D Data Visualization Techniques |
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posted by Editor
on Monday June 12, @05:11PM
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This page was put together by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to showcase some interesting data visualization techniques. The lab has performed extensive research on data visualization as part of a program called IN-SPIRE (Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration), and has published numerous papers on the subject. Here are some of the approaches shown:
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Galaxies uses the image of stars in the night sky to represent a set of documents (see screenshot).
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ThemeView represents the topics or themes within a set of documents as a relief map of natural terrain, whereby "mountains" indicate dominant themes (see screenshot).
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ThemeRiver helps users identify time-related patterns, trends, and relationships across a large collection of documents (see screenshot).
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Topic Islands applies wavelet transforms to a custom digital signal constructed from words within a document which can be used to generate fuzzy document outlines, summarizing text by levels of detail and according to user interests (see screenshot).
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| PS3 Visualizes OS Process Activity In 3D |
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posted by Editor
on Sunday May 21, @05:45PM
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ps3 is a utility for visually monitoring Linux process activity in 3D. It is similar to the top utility for UNIX & Linux, except that it updates process activity information up to 100 times per second instead of once every three seconds. Process activity is visualized in 3D, with interactive rotation, zooming and scaling (see screenshot). The code can be downloaded here.
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