Source – Halo Wars Theme
[tweetmeme]3D capabilities are obviously not new to UX, I’ve been building real-time 3D UI’s for 10 years, the academic community has been exploring the use of the third dimension for over 30 years (without much fruit I might add). Hollywood continues to fantasize and provoke us UX designers to imagine more dimensional user experiences. Perhaps for the first time however we are witnessing a bit of a critical mass for real working 3D UI’s. I think there are a number of factors influencing this trend from the change of perception of console gaming as a popular consumer activity vs. niche hardcore activity.
There are many different ways to break down this huge topic, we could talk about 3d natural input systems (from Nintendo’s Wii to Sony’s Eye toy, to Microsoft’s project Natal), and this defiantly worthy of later blog post. We could talk to the many examples recently we’ve seen augmented reality demos take hold and stir the imagination of digital designers everywhere. Similarly the use of 3D presentation techniques continues to stir the imagination as well as innovations around the use of eye and head tracking to generate the impression of 3D in your mind. I’ll ignore the stupid ‘3D headsets’ sub-story here, personally I hope to never don 3D glasses or a headest in order to use a piece of software, outside of gaming. So for this blog post series I wanted to concern myself with onscreen real-time 3d graphics used in traditional GUI and UX design.
This post sets up the series, and there are three distinct subtopics I want to address at a pretty high level. My second post is going to be about ‘3D Aesthetics’, the third post is ‘3D UI systems’, the fourth is ‘3D tools’. The 3D Aesthetics topic looks at the visual appeal of 3D graphics, the styles possible the new techniques a visual designer must become familiar with. The 3D UI systems topic addresses some simple truths about what seems to work, what doesn’t work and why, and what seems to put people off. The 3D tools topic explores the state of the tools, engines and how as a designer can you pull this off today.
3D is here, but there’s still a lot to learn before creating something compelling
At Artefact over the last year we’ve noticed a visual trend towards more use of 3D graphics techniques in all forms of digital design. The consumer electronics industry and motion picture industry are really pushing 3D technologies hard. As a company focused on building next generation user experiences we’ve consciously and deliberately been exploring the use of 3D graphics techniques in the design of new platform user experiences and rich internet applications. A cursory look at the last 10 projects we’ve worked several have explored 3D UX and visual aesthetics as part of the proposed final product experience.
A couple of personal beliefs I have about screen based 3D. Firstly, I don’t buy into the idea that 3D UI is inherently better in some way than 2D UI. The reality is that 3D UX is way more difficult to get right and can have some inherent drawbacks in terms of fundamental visual communication principles (usually excessive clutter). The simple reality is that most UX content, (Video, Photos and text) are inherently ‘2D’ digital objects so how can there really be any benefit to presenting them in a 3d space?. Free form 6 axis navigation without full emersion virtual reality is a terrible choice for almost all applications outside of simulating exploration of simulated virtual worlds. There’s a ton of research about the added conceptual burden of navigating through fully 3D UI’s, but at the same time the obvious fact remains that we live and operate successfully in the real 3D world.
On the positive side of this argument, I hope to demonstrate that there is something ‘viscerally’ compelling about 3D movement and 3D visual style, which personally and I think commercially is undeniably successful. When designers take the time to understand and master the new visual levers at their disposal, (depth, lighting, animation, cameras, physics and materials.) really exciting and delightful experiences can be created that give user experience designers new ways to engage and delight users as they interact with digital products of all kinds. In addition I’ll argue that various technologies are going to bring 3D UX to the mainstream in the very near future so we’d better start some kind of discourse about them.
When UX designers don’t understand 3D UI very well, we unsurprisingly end up with crap.
