2-D or not 2-D, that is the question!
Having just posted a short piece on Search 3.0 or 3-D, a reader contributed this perspective:
Posted by Joss Mondes digitaux
Ce billet fait suite à un commentaire sur le blog Second Life Business de Stephan Bayle où j’exprimais mon désaccord avec la vision présentée par un White Paper d’Orange sur l’évolution des mondes digitaux:
“A terme, la jonction de ces mondes virtuels pourrait constituer le Metaverse, la représentation d’une plateforme Internet dans laquelle les interfaces utilisateurs 2D auront totalement laissé place à un système interactif en trois dimensions.”
The French post continues here.
The English translation follows:
(An) original post followed an assertion found in a White Paper by Orange, which I would translate as follows:
The junction of all virtual worlds will eventually form the Metaverse, i.e. an internet platform where 2-D user interfaces will have vanished in favour of a three dimensional interactive system.
I strongly disagree with such an assertion for two reasons :
- It is based on a confusion between the structure and the dimension of a space
- Immersion in 3-D spaces is not a universal solution
Structure and dimension of a space
Borrowing the distinction used by Richard Bartle, brought to my attention by Nicola Nova, the structure of space can be of two types : contiguous or continuous.
A contiguous space is basically a graph, where navigation consists in hopping from one node to another following links. The internet is an example of a contiguous world.
A continuous space is a space like our physical space, where you can always find a point between any two given points. A continuous space can be one-, two-, three-, many-dimensional. Older video games were played in two dimensions (think of Pong). Second Life is a synthetic 3-D continuous space.
Given these definitions, it is obvious that it is nonsense to talk about dimensions when the space at hand is contiguous.
To spice this up, it can be added that contiguous world we are dealing with are actually networked continuous spaces. For example the internet is a graph whose nodes are pages. And pages are 2-D spaces.
Croquet is an example of networked three-dimensional spaces.
This nesting of continuous spaces into contiguous spaces is in fact necessary to make them graspable by humans: contiguous spaces in themselves are pure mathematic constructs.
Limits of immersion
The assertion quoted earlier is then unclear about whether the envisioned internet is one single continuous 3-D space, a la SL, or some networked 3-D spaces, a la Croquet.
I am not an opponent to 3-D representation. However I think the hype surrounding this subject is not presently justified, and is probably due to some technophile blindness. Once again I feel the urge to assert that there is no universal interface. Only practices, which determine particular physical and cognitive contexts, will discriminate which interfaces are relevant to the task at hand.
Let me give one example of the limits of 3-D representations:
Immersion in 3-D environment is by nature very attention-consuming (otherwise such environments would probably not be called immersive). This quality has benefits (not discussed here) and at least one drawback : it does not easily allow multi-tasking. This goes the opposite way from many uses, which Stefana Broadbent (via Nicola Nova) noticed to be cumulative (i.e. not exclusive) and stacked in the background.
Note : in the original post I gave more examples that seem today not as pertinent as I thought then. I have since written some articles about the comparative qualities of 2-D and 3-D spaces, but it would be a little long to go over.
Conclusion
3-D sounds kind of magic: Web 3.0, Web 3-D, these sounds alike. There is no formal definition of what Web 2.0 is (and probably will never be), how could one tell what Web 3.0 will be. This rather coincidental similarity between the two terms is too catchy to deliver any truth. But we hear people taking it for granted. Their answer to “this service is not delivering its full potential” is “let’s add a dimension, it can only be better” (because more is better !). Well, sorry, but not necessarily… It can be better…or worse !
