In the yeaaaaarrrr 2000! As I recall, we were all supposed to be flying around with jetpacks and using Minority Report-esque hardware by now, but that still hasn’t come to pass. Thankfully the folks at InSpace are on the job. The system, which is mostly software, allows you to see media and information in a three-dimensional space. Before you chortle into your beard while thinking of all the reasons this is a bad idea, think about it for a second.
Essentially the team is looking at a new browsing paradigm that allows you to move through “space” to find files and run programs. Created by David Holme and Servan Keondjian, the system has been funded to the tune of £400,000 by private angels.
“We are not aware of anyone who is trying to do what we are implementing other than Hollywood special effects departments,” said Holme. “We postulate that in 10 years time desktop, TV, and tablet interfaces will have evolved to be considerably richer, clearer and far more advanced than they currently are and we want our technology to power this. In addition we are close to being granted a patent covering the broad navigation paradigm of hierarchical 3D space.”
You can sign up for a beta here and enter the year 20000000!
Will this ever, dare I say it, take off? Who knows. We still haven’t mastered touch and that paradigm has been with us for most of a decade. The old screen/mouse/keyboard works just fine for most of the computing population but a truly usable 3D experience would be amazing and, perhaps, could snap us out of some of the older ruts of user experience we’ve all fallen into. Video was changed by non-linear editing. What happens when we start using non-linear computing.