OK, we do 3D But how do we design for it?
October 15th, 2007
Last week, I wound up at this amazing demonstration of the amount of elements you can draw on the screen with Actionscript 3 and Papervision 3D.
The picture shows 1234 elements, but I actually got to around 2500 earlier. Wow! OK: I’ll grant that Papervision manages the screen so that everytihng that isn’t necessary is not drawn, and that the element are not interactive, and have no animation within them. But this mindblowing nonetheless.
Hold on, this post is not YAPD (Yet another Papervision demo); it’s not even on Papervision itself. It’s that this one demonstration of orderly colourful animated elements in a 3D, depth-of-field-enabled environment, seems just like one of those things that seems to set a milestone on technology. It’s a very real proof that the combination of Papervision and the AVM2 can finally be used on a real project, not a deployed extension of a demo.
But this got me thinking (and threw me in a very productive discussion with my friend Daniel Morena): are web designers (myself included) ready to design for a 3D web? It’s been not even a week since I wrote on the difficulty most of us have with articulating a new visual language that is truly unique to the web! How could we jump from no letting go of magazines and brochures to stepping into a completely interactive, immersive 3D space?
3D is not the answer to everything, but it may just solve some very difficult design issues we may have. The thing is: we don’t know how to design for 3D. The web (and the GUI as a whole) has been a 2 dimensional environment forever. We got as far as creating tabs and overlapping windows to emulate some familiar sense of depth that helps users organize information on the screen. But really going three-D, and making a whole website that truly makes use of this opportunity, is hard.
A friend forwarded me a link to a post by Kevin Sweeney, in which he demonstrates his utter in-satisfaction with everything that has been built with PV3D until now. I can’t tell for sure, but I do believe the origin for such disappointment is that: things have not been designed to be 3D, they’re that way simply because technology allowed.
Extending a PV3D demo doesn’t count. As well as creating some layout in which some two-dimensional plates float, and end-up parallel to the screen and actually being needed. I believe we need to embrace the 3D. I’m just not sure we all know how to design for it yet.