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Ever since that Minority Report scene hit us, it seems the tech world is bent on making it a UI reality.

It won’t be the first time science chases fiction, and as far as hardware goes, the Wii, SIXAXIS, Surface, PS3 Eye and of course, the iPhone are all steps (or leaps?) in the right direction.

They certainly feel more intuitive than those gloves & helmet VR combos they tried to push consumers with back in the early-mid 90s.

Now, hardware being one part of the futuristic user interface, GUI, the visualization of display interaction makes for the other part. And ‘3D’ seems to be centric in the issue of display, no one seems to be sure exactly how.

You can google for numerous posts and articles on the topic of 3D environments and 2.5D / 3D user interfaces and while you’re at it, you can find even more posts and articles explaining why these do not seem to work as virtual work environments (despite that cool VR scene from Disclosure) or as a generic community environments.

And not from lack of trying. Each Hitech bubble came with its own slew of 3D environments based startups, and none have managed to maintain outside the realm of gaming (and this is the reaosn, IMHO,  why SecondLife, which seperates itself from the classical definition of ‘game’ is struggling for survival (despite the strong echo-chamber factor).

I think that the answer to ‘why 3D evironments don’t work as execution/productive environments’ is rooted in our neglect of the fact that any 3D environment out there is still a 3D emulation inside a 2D rectangle (our standard screen display).

Think about that for a second. What gamers & 3D designers take for granted out of habit, is that navigating and moving in a 2D defined 3D environment requires considerable effort and learning curve. 3D software beginners often tend to ‘lose’ their objects in the 3D space just from poorly being able to manipulate the viewing interface. Likewise, 3D shooter noobs are known to wander into walls, directing their POV to the floor/ceiling when it is supposed to be straight ahead, and so on. They know they need to run for cover and shoot the bad guys, they are just not skilled enough to perform it.

One must think that new-breed users (anyone younger than 25, basically), having these gaming/editing skills engraved in them since early age would not see that as a problem. While this might be true to some extent, even pro-gamers and veteran 3D artists acknowledge how much effort (our own personal brain multitasking) is being taken for the navigational/viewing interface maintenance. When applied to work/productivity scenarios that are not 3D by nature – it always translates as encumbering or time-wasting.

Hardcores would claim this is the inevitable results, as noting beats speed & effiecency then well memorized shortcut keys and indeed by speed-typing commands from a terminal CLI. Translated to normal users concept – using mouse+keyboard on Facebook would always be simpler and faster than running around WoW style between 3D room portrays of your social neworks. In that respect, it is interesting to see that Sony decided to do just that (3D WoW style, social virtual world), in attempting to win some points vs. the already successful and (i get no joy from admitting that, believe me) more highly regarded professionally MS XBOX 360 Live Arcade, which basically uses (neatly designed) 2D menus and windows.

Combating the hardcores, optimistic visionaries (and for the purpose of this post, I’l align myself with that group) would claim that it is all about functionalty. The wastful/encumbring nature of 3D social/work environments is true. But only because in does not introduce any new or improved functionalities in its ususally presented manner (3D chat rooms, WoW style virtual work places, etc.). The only potential functionalty this concept has to offer, the intuitive, more lifelike mingling amid a social crowd is negated completely by the UI. From the mechanical point of view, mingling in a 3D bar is nothing like mingling in a real live bar. The same goes for a virtual workplace.

Moreover, the way I see it, anonymity and timelessness are the 2 major advantages the online social environments has to offer versus the worldly one, and maybe tossing them back for a mockup 3d mimicry of reality is not the brightest of concepts.

In short, (though it has been quite a loooong preface) though 3D is the obvious next building block in our culture’s futuristic UI roadmap, applying it to the representation of user avatars and 3D space interaction has proven to be a dead-end, despite the seemingly-natural moves from 3D shooters and MMoGs. This concept will have its day, don’t worry. It will happen when 3D moves out from our 2D monitors and into our 3D world. Wether the first device is a transperant-OLED- embedded-eyeglasses, triple-monitor displays based on those flight-simulaters GUIs or perhaps indeed, even a 3D holographic of a more “help-me-obi-one-kenobi-u-r-my-only-hope!” nature – time will tell.

But this post is about today.

What then? if we’re not to run around virtual cyberspace while we still use standard computer displays, what form of 3D presentation can we use in order to bring tomorrow today? I was pondering that very questions thoroughly for the past few weeks, researching many directions, as I have a current business projects that includes defining and designign a ‘next-generation’ GUI for a high end “enterprise level IT Architecture software” (I’m still learning what that last sentence means myself .

I already had a hunch the direction is more likely to be 2.5D than 3D, because of all the aforementioned ‘3D inside a 2D display cage’ realizations, but it didn’t really hit me until I added CooIris to my firefox and turned it on.

In a nutshell, CoolIris is a 3D browser plugin for searching video and images in popular sites like youtube, google, hulu, flickr, etc. It also offers a non search-based exploration mode called ‘Discover’, showing you predefined results based on popular content categories (news, entertainment, tech, music videos, etc.) If you want the full Low-Down, you should try it or check the CoolIris website (but really, you should try it .

For starters, it’s stunning. Regardless of your personal design style preference, you’ll agree the standard search result pags of google/flickr/youtube couldn’t hold a candle to the sleek CoolIris presentation. However, as I pointed out earlier, eye-candy itself couldn’t justify a 3D UI in a 2D display. The speed & efficiency of CoolIris were the 2nd good sign. While many 3D plugins and extension usually come with slugginesh and resource hogging, thus ruining the user experience with slow reaction & interaction hiccups. Not so with CoolIris. In an instant the fullscreen display appears, and the search results thumbnails rapidly follow. Unlike standard search results UI, there are no result pages – flying left & right with the mouse simply scrolls all results from beginning to end. I didn’t look under the hood, but I bet it uses some smart fetching methods, as under broadband DSL, the loading of more thumbnail results was as seamless as one could get with sata stored on public remote servers.

Now there are a lot more features and tweaks that can be implemented into CoolIris to make its functionality even greater, but right off the bat they got a lot of stuff right:

I already mentioned how fast it loads. In fact it feels too light-weight to be true. I am running it on my 2.16Ghz white MacBook, which is WEAKER than the lowest end white macbook currently being phased out at the apple stores. It doesn’t flinch when launching CoolIris, not even with several other Firefox tabs open and a couple of Adobe CS4 apps open in the backgound.

In addition, the fact that you can download it, install it and run it on any browser in mere minutes, is a very good 3D GUI sell-point. Many 3D applications comes attached with prerequisites from here till kingdom come (frameworks, engines, runtime environments and whatnot) and while one might dismiss this for the obvious ‘you only install once’ reason, one really shouldn’t, as in reality many times one have to install several times (crashes and upgrades often see to that) and also, in reality, one might want to use his GUI of choice from an “accidental” computer, such as a friend’s computer or an Internet cafe workstation. With CoolIris, even if your accidental computer does not come installed with it, performing the installation is so quick and pain-free, I can’t see it discouraging users.

Also worth mentioning is the browser interoperability. Switching between the CoolIris gorgeous full screen display and the standard search results page or to the target result page is just one floating-icon click away. Bookmarking thumbnail in your own 3D wall is a new too cool for school way of bookmarking videos & images – without downloading the actual file to your computer or having to contend with the tedious maintenance of clutterd browser bookmarks or site specific playlists/bookmarks. You simply click the floating star icon (much like starring a Gmail message) and all that is saved on your HD is a small thumbnail and a URL. Let the cloud keep everything else.

Not that I don’t have an improvement wishlist already for CoolIris (Remote Control interface for Apple Safari would be nice, refining search option, multiple personal walls, smart walls (like iTunes smart playlists – predefined user searches that updates each time u view them, to name a few) – But at its current state, CoolIris is still impressive as hell and really brings tomorrow today.

As I have to end this post at some point, I just wanna say that the topic of 2.5D and Z-axis hirearchies is something that interests me a lot and deserves (at least) a post within itself. Any comments and illuminations in that regard would be most welcome.

Looking foreword to your comments on this,

Robot55