Tips needed for my thesis about 3D/Interactive media

[4leggedcreature]

Hi, I'm writing a thesis about 3D for my final year of design college. My thesis question is: "What is the added value of 3D regarding interactive media, like websites or games?"
In other words: what are the advantages of 3D?

I have been searching a lot on the internet to find suitable sources/articles, but it is very hard to find. I'm also quite stuck on: what should I write about the added value of 3D.

Anyone has any ideas? Anything could help. Little things...
Any websites I can check for info or any interesting things that could help me?
Thanks in advance for your time.

(Background: My major is interaction design, minor is 3D. I also do 3D modeling and also interactive design)

[ASWC]

We human beings see in 3d, so creating 3d interactivity is giving to our eyes and our brain something that we immediatly understand instinctivly.

[newblack]

We human beings see in 3d, so creating 3d interactivity is giving to our eyes and our brain something that we immediatly understand instinctivly.
we actually see 3D space mapped into a 2D image. If we could see in 3 dimensions, we could see objects from all directions simultaneously. It's not as subtle of a point as it sounds, and I believe it to be the reason televisions, monitors and paper etc. are so successful.

It always bugs me when the term "real 3D" gets tossed around. It's no more 3D in my opinion than a 2D side-scrolling game; which could, in equal fairness, be considered 3D (with a bastardized perspective). Search the YouTubes for a trailer of a forthcoming PS3 game called LittleBigPlanet. It so resembles what we're accustomed to 2D side-scrolling, yet there's "real 3D" (lol) going on, and hopefully illustrates my point here.

To answer the original question though, it's hard to say. There's not many worse things on the internets than bad 3D... But it definitely adds all of the complexity that comes with increasing dimension- for better or worse.

[ASWC]

I'm just trying to give ideas for his thesis. No we don't see in 3d, because there's no such thing as 3d in real life, but we have a depth perception and the whole point of 3d is to recreate the depth perception effect. You know what the "real 3d" term stands for, it's just a way to distinguish between fake 3d and 3d engines and it's true that in a way 3d engines are also a fake 3d but it's an advanced fake 3d (depending on which engine we are talking about).

[newblack]

i wasn't trying to refute what you were saying, just adding my opinion! sorry if it seemed like i was being a prick... i was just hoping to address the notion that there actually ISN'T a difference between what gets called interactive 2D and 3D unless you get far more specific. that fact is interesting to me and i thought it might be to the poster also.

[evride]

well I would suggest searching articles about why secondlife is so popular. I've never been able to understand why its so popular and why the users just cant use IM.

also look into 3d desktops like looking glass, tactile 3D, and Beryl or bureau 3D for Ubuntu/Linux.


i think the general idea of adding 3d to interfaces and media is that it gives you more ways to customize (which is hot right now and kinda pointless) and sometimes helps you find things more easily by displaying more content up front without many clicks.

[asf8]

On a similar topic (2D/3D) Johnny Chung Lee has done some awesome work..

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote (VERY COOL)

EA is set to come out with something using the head tracking soon. (this is gonna change everything ;-)

(Probably been posted before on the forum, but I just saw it the other day and thought it was pretty slick, seemed like a similar topic ;-)

[jsebrech]

I think the benefit of 3D in navigation is that you can make more advanced spatial navigation systems (though the complexity might come at a usability cost for some), and that it's easier to accentuate particular content, because you can bring stuff "into focus", and let other things "fall away".