On Week 26

skyjake

skyjake:

Last week was extremely busy for me at work as I was trying to get our experimental Nokia Beta Labs app released on time. (If you happen to own a Symbian^3 phone you're most welcome to try it out. ) I had effectively zero time to spend on Doomsday.

The good news is that my summer vacation has started, so I should have a significant amount of time to spend on finishing up with the multiplayer fixes during the next couple of weeks.

danij:

Like skyjake, I also have had very little time for deng this week, mostly due to the wonderful weather. I find it very difficult to motivate myself to code, with the sun blazing down outside, after having spent all day behind a monitor.

Still, I don't expect this situation to last much longer..., this is England after all

DaniJ

@skyjake - I'm liking the look of Nokia 3D World Gaze, congrats to you both (I see how this relates to the previous paper you published).

Combining geotagged media with a 3d world browser is certainly interesting, though I must say that I find it less useful in a practical sense, compared to a "traditional" directory/index listing of content. I think there is a lot of potential for such interfaces but as yet, no one has hit upon the "magic widget" to make it both intuitive and more-representative of the data itself.

I have the vague idea that projecting relative points onto a compass- and gps- aligned hemi-icosahedron (think of it as a convex desktop) rather than a spherical model of the world would be more intuitive. Points towards the edges of the hemi-icosahedron being further away from the observer in real-world coordinates. The benefit for such a design is that you only have to think about content location-ally in two dimensions.

skyjake

Thanks DaniJ, I'm also quite happy with how the visuals turned out.

The practicality of our approach is admittedly one of the weakest points, but at least it is grounded in physical reality: this is what you would see if your eyes had the magical ability to see through all the dirt and stone and magma below. If your approach is instead based on some abstract concept, it would seem most logical to rely on the one taught to us in school: tradional 2D maps. It is hard to beat familiarity when it comes to UIs. (Which raises the question, would our approach be more intuitive if taught in school? Kids already think about digging tunnels to China and wherever...)

DaniJ

I guess the fundamental question is whether the extra dimension in physical space is a useful property of an element of media content for communication/representation use. Naturally, this will vary depending on the type of media, however, I would argue that this will normally be the least important property of a element of media. Well, at least for those only interested in events on planet earth.

While the relative difference in three dimensional space between observer and media origin is largely irrelevant, if you factor in the curvature of the earth and actual time of comparison then this information does become useful for transforming the visual representation of the content (for example, lighting a content element according to day-night progression).

The approach I was getting at was: drawing a segment of the world from an elevated first person perspective, rather than as a third person looking at a sphere. Beyond a "useful" distance, there is no need to represent the world physically in a realistic manner, instead transitioning into a more abstract "web of nodes".