Beyond the Desktop
Dissertation: MSc Virtual Environments, UCL, London, 1998
Disclaimer: I love Brahms, not so much the Sex Pistols. Yet I live in England and Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols have defined a very interesting part of the history and culture of this country. I have read everything I could about what happened between 1976 and 1977 and created a mental map, which was structured like a relational database. Then designed an interface that could display that. There is time, there are people and there are events.
As the visitor moves through the space, the abstract structure keeps being centred on her: she is always are the crossroad between a specific time, an event, while looking at them from the backyard of one of the characters involved. As you move around you do not so much change your location in space: instead, you are following a timeline or a personal history, but most often the intersections between them. It is the space that moves around you and re-centres on you, displaying different content depending on where, metaphorically, you are in the time/space/people continuum.
The Library of Babel, Canal+, 1999
Jorge Luis Borges has created some of the most fascinating and influential edifices of imagination, true artificial environments where the mind, rather than the body, is the master and commander. In one of these, The Library of Babel, written in 1941, is a vast metaphor for the universe, in the form of a near-infinite library with 410-page books in neat bookshelves. The books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters, spaces and punctuation marks). For instance, one of those books will contain this very essay, while another one will contain my later rebuttal of it.
When I was invited by Fabric | CH to design a piece for a virtual museum to be hosted by Canal+ and I was given the constraint of a room, my very first - and very superficial - intent would have been to do my own piece outside that room. Many nights (and many iterations afterwards), the result was the opposite, yet equally, if not more, arrogant: design a tiny space, with more even tinier spaces, infinitely nested. Visitors see for wireframe cubes: as the get close, the cubes start pulsating. As you enter one of them, the space expands while the visitor contracts and slows down. Inside each cube, there are wireframe walls, each with an abstract picture frame and a random sequence of characters. You get deeper and deeper, lost inside the pseudo-infinite, yet physically very small space, looking for the random sentence that will reveal something to you. When you donʼt find it, you have another four cubes, taking you further, although not any farther, looking for the hidden meaning which may appear and then be lost.
Thinking three-dimensionally
In my further work, after the year 2000, the abstraction of space has become all I have been thinking about. I have done quite a few more three-dimensional interfaces, for all sort of applications: museums, virtual communities, ecommerce marketplaces.
Slowly, I have lost faith in three-dimensional interface design and started concentrating on the idea of thinking in 3D.
The web is the only medium that has a strong spatial metaphor: you navigate, you move, you go to a website and eventually you get lost. Netscape was indeed called Navigator, while Safariʼs icon is a compass. You donʼt go to a TV show or a book.
In my work with Keepthinking, that I started in 2001, I have been exploring the idea of linking my earlier career as an architect to the architecture of the web, or information architecture. Designing a digital extension for a Museum is akin to designing an extension to a building, with the added advantage of infinite layouts.
I havenʼt done very little three-dimensional work in recent years, at least in the form described above. 3D is not a visualisation tool, but rather a way of organising thoughts and information.
I said it earlier: Iʼm an architect and I design spaces. I discovered that the line between architecture and information architecture is a rather thin one: in one, like in the other, you design and build spaces.
Years of work and the challenges in building sensible interfaces have taught me that in most cases, many users find it difficult to navigate three-dimensional spaces on two-dimensional computer screens. There is often too much distraction going on, to allow focussing on what you are there to do. And the navigation interfaces of VRML (Cortona, Cosmo, Blaxxun and more recently Papervision, Silverline or Unity) are not helping - they are just not very good as yet. You need a lot of concentration just to move the way you want, let alone doing something else. The sensory interface is not very good, there is no notion of peripheral vision or spatial sound: all too much of a compromise.
At the same time, users get lost in very simple websites. Which in turn suggest that for now, the work in in proper 3D planning of digital spaces.
Will we be able to more around in three-dimension? I certainly think so, but itʼll still take a while. We are still learning the alphabet of the medium. Iʼm keeping a close eye on this, and Iʼll be back.
