I have no doubt that we'll see some awful applications of 3D rendering as the technology becomes more accessible. That's what's happened to many other advancements and many we take for granted now. But I wouldn't be so glib to write it off as a gimmick.
The test is whether the technology supports a useful metaphor. Consider some pervasive metaphors we have now: desktops, pages, windows ... these metaphors are 2D. If an interface works well in 2D, it's because the metaphors work well and these metaphors are 2D. Trying to graft in 3D effects for the sake of it is unlikely to work well. But consider any less-than-trivial set of model classes in an application. Consider the associations between objects. It's not hard to see that these are multi-dimensional. I'm sure we've all encountered challenges trying to represent multi-dimensional data on a 2D plane. If we think deeply about our data, knowing we have one more dimension in which to represent it, perhaps some really useful metaphors will present themselves. That's when we'll find the extra dimension useful. This is just one example that's comes to mind. There will be others. I, for one, will keep an open mind about it. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby or Rails Oceania" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
