Up to now, interaction design accessed two dimensions. Established conventions about how to use the top strip and the far left column of page space show that we have assembled a meaningful and efficient grip on how to engage any body of content therein, be it an app or a site.
But maybe now we can move into new conventions that look more like a tetherball game than a book. Carnegie Mellon student Johnny Lee has prototyped the use of the Wii remote controller to show how an individual user can navigate in a 3D space.
What’s interesting for my work is the possibility of organizing one’s personal information in that space to make connections faster across different lists: contacts, calendar, to dos, as well as the communication messaging actviities and reusage itself. We can tether bits of our lives together to make a more interesting visual representation of our day, our work, our identity, our community, than we could have up to now in a 2-D environment of page or paper. What goals would be associated with that potential? Hmm..
Well, in the short-term Johnny’s simple headtracking should prove the value of the telepresence for the individual user. This headtracking mechanism could afford individuals in a geographically distributed team to “gather around”, and so become of one mind in the deep engagement of the design they are discussing.
What is missing in that scenario is the easy translation of everyday data into visual representations of data, a la Smart Money’s Map of the Market or NewsMap if they turned 3-d to show other variables in play. My husband’s start-up ModViz, purchased this March by NVidia, had a product that dynamically generated 3-d, high resolution visualizations of complex data sets (like geological data from oil explorations). Maybe the combination of all these technologies isn’t far off at all. Maybe we’ll soon treat two dimensions as archaic, and be immersed into our work like never before. Bring it on!
And, thanks Johnny Lee!
