Comment by comex
7 years ago
> A pencil is a 3D interface.
Is it? I’d say the VR analogue of a pencil is a pointing device, which makes the user interface the VR analogue of paper. And paper is fundamentally a 2D interface. There are some 3D actions like turning a page, but those are secondary and rare. You can move and rotate the paper as a whole in 3D, and that’s useful, but the same functionality can easily be added to VR 2D interfaces.
On the other hand, there are other types of art that are fundamentally 3D, such as sculpture and pottery – but both of those rely on feeling a 3D object with your hands, which partially bypasses the 2D limitation of vision, but isn’t yet possible to emulate in VR.
Then again, there’s also the common VR toy of a “pencil” that doodles in thin air, which is certainly interesting... though I’m not sure how well it generalizes to more abstract user interfaces. If you’re using such a system, you have to constantly rotate the object you’re drawing, and/or move your body around, in order to properly perceive the object in 3D. This is kind of a pain. If your primary goal is to create a 3D object, it’s an unavoidable pain and the benefit is well worth it; but if what you’re interacting with is just an abstract interface meant to manipulate something non-spatial, it’s probably better to avoid.
> both of those rely on feeling a 3D object with your hands, which partially bypasses the 2D limitation of vision, but isn’t yet possible to emulate in VR.
That's the entire point of the comment you're responding to and the reason for Dynamicland.
If so, it was off topic. John Carmack's post was about VR interfaces, and I interpreted the parent comment in that context. In any case, I would contest that bypassing the limitations of vision, specifically, represents a significant part of the reason for Dynamicland.
If you "would contest" that, it's because you still haven't read the essay that was linked in the putatively off-topic comment you were "responding" to, after eight years. And, yeah, you could try to redefine "VR" and even "3D interfaces" (the actual topic) as being strictly limited to "binocular video responding to a head tracker", but even "VR" researchers have been researching haptic and kinesthetic feedback from a zillion angles for a lot more than eight years, so I don't think it's off-topic at all.
> I’d say the VR analogue of a pencil is a pointing device, which makes the user interface the VR analogue of paper
In this day and age, when accelerometers can be embedded in small objects, why don't we stop using analogues and just design a real world smart pencil that be used to control the VR floating pencil?
Because it's not a natural interface?
Given there are is no touch feedback when you feel surfaces in VR and that just holding your arms up in the arm for long periods of times is tiring, I honestly don't see why it's any better than pointing on a 2D surface.
People wanted to do Minority Report-style UIs when they saw them, but we generally don't interact with computers in those ways for the same reason. Keyboard and mouse (or trackpad) is going to be hard to improve upon.