A few weeks ago I mentioned the 3-D Web in a post about Second Life. Along these lines, an interesting press release arrived this morning from a company who are launching a three-dimensional visualisation for Web searching – a tool they call SpaceTime.
A quick look at their demonstration shows that after executing a Web search all the relevant webpages are displayed in a three dimensional visualisation – what they call a 3-D stack – stretching away from the viewer. Clicking on a page brings it to the fore. This could be particularly useful for searching for an image as you can ‘thumb’ through the stack looking for the best one and the company says the product will work with Google Images and Yahoo images.
I’ve not had time for a detailed play but what’s interesting is that this way of moving around a connected series of visual images reminds me of a demo I saw a couple of years ago of Ted Nelson’s ZigZag data structures project. The data appeared in a series of connected stacks and you could mine information by spinning around a kind of three-dimensional ‘wheel’ of connected data.
As the amount of information we have to handle at any one time increases, the use of the 3rd dimension is going to become more prevalent.
Tech Lunch 
July 4, 2007 at 6:23 pm |
This is like the web version of the MacOSX window handling system or Vista’s aero window interface.
Nice touch and geared for broadband usage to cater for the pulling off of all that data in the time required to build the window stack, rather than just creating a text page.
Combined with touch-screen technology you could build a visual bookmark system?
I bet the Spammers can’t wait to find a flaw to use the system to put up endless window panes rather than pop-ups 🙂
July 10, 2008 at 11:59 am |
[…] in all, the 3-D Web, which we wrote about last July, seems to be coming along nicely. I shall begin work on embedding a […]