Interactive 3D Timeline

The Interactive 3D Timeline is a method for organizing and displaying content in a Wonderland world. The content can be on any topic that lends itself to time ordered organization. Examples of content suitable for a timeline-style organization include literary history, world history, product evolutions, social trends, news stories, biographies, and project plans.

The vision for the timeline in this particular project is to organize the data in a spiral fashion, with the beginning of the span of time appearing at the bottom of the timeline and the end of the timeline span (or the current date) being represented at the top-most point in the spiral.

Top level components of a timeline (required ones in bold):

• Title
• Description
• Start date
• Autogenerate
• Image
• Tags
• Layout template
• End date
• Granularity
• Providers (new track or overlay)

Auto-Generating a Timeline

Some timelines may automatically grow as time progresses, in which case the spiral will continue to get taller.

Timelines can be created automatically and then "curated" to add events, models, portals, or other custom components. This project will involve creating some sample timeline providers. These are aggregated sources of data that can be used to add new tracks to the timeline spiral. In this mockup, the timeline has been created using a news track with the query "automobile." The track is labeled so that avatars walking up the ramp can see on the floor the name of the track and the query used to produce the data being displayed on the outer edge of the track.

Other examples of providers include:

• Google news - text and image versions, several topics
• Wikipedia events
• Top news stories
• Time magazine covers
• Historic stock quotes - daily, weekly, or monthly
• Yahoo RSS/XML feeds News, etc. probably the best all-around XML source
• Historical weather data since 1933 (no XML).
  • Example
• Phases of the moon
• Earthquake data
• last.fm
  • Top music hits of each decade: use http://www.last.fm/music/+tag/yys for 10's - 00's
  • use "best of" yyyy for specific years starting in the 1980s
• NPR (API)

Tips

• Using Google to Fetch All of a Feed's Items

Each of these providers either create a new track on the timeline or an overlay. The Wikipedia Events provider would add a new track to the timeline, with individual events appearing in poster form along the outer edge. The audio providers, on the ohter hand would create overlays, providing ambient audio as the user browses the timeline. A HUD component might also show the name of the audio currently playing.

Curating a Timeline

While the automatic data can provide a way to quickly populate a timeline, curating the timeline is a way to customize it to your exact needs. For example, if your timeline is in year increments, you might want to provide a portal with another timeline that is at a more granular level of detail. Additionally, you might want to provide a portal that can show off a process, provide an interactive experience, or include a detailed 3D model that is too large to include directly on the timeline. Here's an example of portal added to a manual track on the timeline.

And here's an example of what it might look like if you manually add some ambient music to a portion of the timeline.

References:

• BeeDocuments - 3D timelines for Keynote
• History of the World - Timeline in Second Life created at the University of Arizona. Here's an article in EduCause Review about the project: ASTR202, Exploring Life in the Universe, and the Second Life location is here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/LivingintheUniverse/56/179/251
• Dipity - online timelines
• Google Labs News Timeline
• New York Times Timeline
• Simile Open Source Timeline
• TimeGlider has some interesting UI features such as assigning an importance factor to each event so that you can determine which events show up when the user wants to see a coarse level of detail.
• xTimeline allows you to import data from a spreadsheet (.csv) file or from an RSS feed. You can also export to these two formats. The web-based UI is a simple form that asks for an event title, start date, optional end date, image, media, tags, a description, and an option link to source material.
• Building a Timeline Editor from Prefab Parts: The Architecture of an Oblect-Orlented Application (a timeline project Nicole worked on back in the '80s)
• Ted Nelson's hypertext idea for "stretch text" could be applied to the timeline. For example, when activated, new information is added, expanding the original scope. Here's an example, lifted from a University of Calgary email trail:

{Collapsed}  "Stretch text is{}a sentence{}that when{}collapsed
             states its thesis{}and when expanded adds detail." 

{Expanded}   "Stretch text is where a sentence is constructed in 
             such a way that when it is collapsed it states its 
             thesis in simple terms, and when expanded adds 
             detail to further express itself."