MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

THE MIT LABORATORY FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE
DISTINGUISHED LECTURER SERIES
1994-1995
DATE: April 20, 1995

TIME:
3:15 - Refreshments
3:30 - Lecture

PLACE:
MIT, Building 34, Room 101
50 Vassar Street

Professor Andries van Dam
Department of Computer Science
Brown University
"Escaping Flatland - What Lies Beyond WIMP User Interfaces?"

Abstract:

Today's applications on workstations and personal computers predominantly use the desktop metaphor and the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointing) graphical user interface (GUI).

This style of GUI was developed at Xerox PARC more than 20 years ago and then commercialized ten years ago by Apple's Macintosh and more recently by Microsoft in Windows and by the X consortium in Motif. This 20-year-old technology is still very useful and will not soon be replaced. 3D applications, however, particularly those for virtual and augmented reality, can benefit from interfaces that rely more both on direct manipulation in 3D and on 3D widgets that are part of the environment. Such 3D widgets are like tools in the scene that are built in the same development environment as the application objects. This is in sharp contrast to 2D widgets for 3D desktop applications that, like a TV control panel, are outside the 3D environment, and are built with a separate toolkit or interface builder such as Motif. 3D graphics accelerators are becoming commodity items and, even without such accelerators, today's faster processors let 3D rendering libraries optimized for 3D games operate at the level of medium-performance 3D graphics workstations of only a few years ago. These 3D capabilities will allow 3D metaphors such as Xerox PARC's Rooms and Magic Cap's Main Street to become commonplace. I will show examples of 3D widgets and interfaces and briefly discuss a visual toolkit for constructing 3D widgets implemented at Brown.