IconsIn3D

Icons on a 2D desktop work beause the background is static. Having icons on a 3D space conflicts as users zoom in and out in their 3D space and their icons stay the same size. In addition, icons can clutter the desktop and therefore leave the desktop non-functional in a 3D space. What if you could use a mouse click or keyboard+mouse click to bring up a 3D Cube. On the face of the 3D Cube you can have 2D icons. Each face can have 1/4/9/16/25 icons that can be clicked by the user. The user can rotate the face of the cube by pressing F1 for the first face of the cube, pressing F2 for the second face of the cube, and so on until F6. The developers can think of the best way to add applications to the cube.

This idea seems to be simple to implement. I don't know if it will have much visual appeal. A more appealing visual 3D object is a sphere but I don't know how well 2D icons can map on a 3D sphere without distorting it. The idea behind this is to provide users with a quick way to access their favorite applications or directories without having to go to the Launch Menu. If CPU usage is of concern or code writing is too heavy for such a project at the time, I guess having a 2D dialog box appear with icons can do just as well. The only problem I see with this is that our 3D metaphor will not be implemented. It is a start and it is better than nothing.

Icon ideas below

My ideas about icons in 3D

Hmm Cube is a good idea ... but i think that a better idea: Icons should have some restricted sizes .. Our screen can have some kind of docking points where you can dock icon ... fe 5 on top of the screen 3 on left and right side (maybe we can use some kind of animated chain to dock them ) ... then icons will be in the same place and will not disturb the middle of desktop. Docking point maybe moveable ... fe docking point and 9 icons or more that we can dock with it ... then the icons will be in one point ... or we can have coule of docking points .. of course smeking of keypressing may put docking point/points in some special place .. fe. bottom left or right of the screen ... of coz everything should be programable and easy to change for the best for us to use.

-- Main.mrkaczor - 09 Sep 2004

Why not just make them be 3d objects (or at least sprites) that sit somewhere in 3d space? ~calcnerd256

The problem with making icons 3D objects is that they can be mistaken for 3D GUI programs. The nice thing about old, 2D icons is that they are easy to distinguish from programs. Some new method needs to be determined to allow 3D icons to be discrete from the programs they represent (even though the icons may themselves be programs?) -- Ricardo Gladwell 13 Oct 2004

Why not just have a standard '2D' object for 2D applications? Have a little cube with the icon on each side. Or maybe not a cube - just a square that has some depth.

The key to having a practical 3D environment is convenience - 3D is great, unless you have to navigate around for 3 minutes in the environment to find the program you want to run. My idea for the 'desktop icon' (and possibly 'start menu') replacement is to have a right- or middle-button click on the Desktop Environment bring up a little 3D ring of icons.

The ring would be basically be parallel to the 'floor' of the Desktop environment, and could expand if more options were added. Each icon/model would sitting up vertically. Once activated, you would select your desired program by moving the mouse left or right and the ring would rotate. You could also click directly on an icon on the far side of the ring if desired.

If the item was a 'folder', it would spawn another set of 3D icons going up vertically, which could then spawn another horizontal ring of icons, and so on. The icons themselves could be 3D models for the newer 3D application, or a cube/whatever+icon for older 2D apps.

-- David Peterson 30 Oct 2004

My ideas about icons in 3D

How about having a sunflower, where each petal can be associated with a program ? As and when new programs get added petals can be increased.

--Amit 11 Feb. 05

Another idea about 3D icons

My idea is to have 3D icons laying on the top of a virtual desktop. The desktop should become visible by pitching down the camera view, as you were lowering your look from the monitor to your real desktop. The act of "look down" on the desktop can be triggered by mouse gestures, keyboard function key or whatever else. You could dispose the 3D icons on the virtual desktop as they were real object, no matter if they are associated with a document or application. The user could also have the capability to zoom in/out and pan the view as he were really working on his real desktop. Again the old application's 2D icons could be mapped on a cube, disc or other 3D mesh.

-- Ludovico Verducci 24 Aug 2005

I have two separate ideas for icons, the first is that they react to real-time info e.g. the elements and the second would be them reacting with each other. Naturally the icons are 3D and make good use of light source and movement to emphasise on the new dimension.

i) Real-time reaction: This is much more meaningful and global to the whole desktop, even into folders, tied in with personal information like where I live. My computer would use real-time geo-info like the weather to tell what the weather is like right outside of my window and thus change my desktop and icons accordingly.

1. Consider the desktop icons at the beginning of the day, casting an early morning yellow realistic shadow from the sunrise position of the light source at 7:30AM

2. Then in the evening if the sky turned pink into a red sky at night glow, the light source turns velvety pink at 8:30PM, thus giving a pink tint to the vector icons. Imagine if there was a cool breeze that night, the icons would then rotate with full reflection of the night glow in tandem with the weather conditions. (nb: the light source is only shown on the icon and not a replacement to the desktop background picture)

ii) Autonomous Interactive icons: This means that the icons can react not just as above but with user mouse/hand gestures or by themselves. Why not have icons mature at a slower pace like the Tamagotchi’s (electronic animals that needed feeding and grew), or have icons track online conversations with ones partner over IM so a lover heart would glow pinker when at a strong point in the relationship or turn to a colder grey when bonding is strained.

Now consider how surrounding icons would be affected, would water drip down to the icons below it when raining, would beads of rainwater slide down the sides of the icons clinging to their shape and distort them much like paper crinkles in real life?

http://www.geocities.com/samuel_smiley_foes/vvv.JPG__ http://www.geocities.com/samuel_smiley_foes/vvv2.JPG__

I see icons being made with vector tools, not just their frame and plaster some graphics on top, I mean the whole design. I am not sure if it will be possible to get a JPG for example and ‘convert’ it into paths and get a decent vector image from that, or just simply create modern looking icons for effect. The point of using vectors is that they are scalable, thus no distortion plus effects can be modelled like in Toy Story and all current day animations.

I have received replies stating that there would be issues regarding the quality of the icons; effects like greyscale, anti-alias and blending are easy and smooth with static icons but hard when designing convincing looking vectors icons.

As suggested by ‘hideya’ (in the JavaDesktop^? Forum) for the icons to react with each other they must be modelled on some kind of physics system which would allow for the icons now to evolve from simple images into programs (a bit like films).

I envisage icons reactive not just to input data from weather forecasts, user manipulation but also by themselves (in conjunction with other meaningful data) autonomously; even at a slow pace like an evolution of animal or plant growth or with the seasons e.g. a leaf icon.

Could RSS deliver the personal info to the icons, subscribing to icons ha!

**Just comming back to this I see something about SVG, some of the icons on the following link are not too shabby, I could see 3D icons using this format to represent the desktop online when remote computing from the desktop environment:

http://openclipart.org/cgi-bin/navigate/transportation?page=2

Samuel, UK lago@hotmail.co.uk

There's one very simple, commonly-used way to do icons in 3D environments: Take a rasterized icon in high-resolution (e.g. 100x100 pixels, like icons on OS X) and insert it as a single square face into the 3D environment. The face is programmed to always orient itself towards the camera so the user it always looking at it head-on, and to always rotate itself so it's rotationally in sync with the camera's tilt. The face is also programmed to enlarge as an inverse function of 'distance' (given some metric; perhaps the standard Cartesian sqrt(x^2+y^2+z^2) one); something like size = a/(b+distance) where a and b are arbitrary parameters that look good, and also such that 100pixels=a/(b+0).

This is not to say that 3D vector icons aren't interesting or worth pursuing -- in the future -- but currently all application icons are done in 2D. Everyone knows how to create 2D images, and will be creating them for the other platforms their applications will be running on. Not many people know how to easily create 3D graphics, and even fewer know how to create aesthetically pleasing 3D graphics. 3D icons however seem cool, and it would be interesting to allow applications to experiment with them -- but currently the solution I mention above is very easy to implement.

--Mats Ahlgren (c)2006

I think that the question posed is what do we use in three dimensions to provide the functionality that icons on the desktop and system menu (e.g. start menu, apple menu) provide in two dimensions. The greatest drawback to the desktop model is clutter. We can't see the icons on the desktop because windows are in the way, and when we can, there can be so many that it's hard to find them. The system menu has problems too, way to many items, and submenus create hazards when navigating them. (Picture getting to your desired program, seven levels in, only to accidentally highlight something in the second level and have to re-navigate to your program. Now imagine that menu is trying to navigate your 3D desktop. 3D clutter will be worse than 2D.

There may be a clever, intuitive and 3D way to go about solving these problems, but in the mean time, 'desktop' icons should, at command, come up in front of the camera, whether they be animated 3D models, 2D graphics on 3D surfaces, or simple static sprites, and behave much like a 2D desktop. System menus, however, should be changed to make above-level menus shrink down to only the selected submenus, to avoid accidents and to make navigating the 3D desktop easier.

-- Main.eadams890 - 20 Feb 2007