A Three-Dimensional GUI for Windows Explorer

Computer users are currently bound to the “desktop” metaphor. This metaphor’s longevity is a testament to the strength of its design. Of course, over twenty-some years improvements have been made to that original design, but the basic elements (e.g. icons, pop-up and pull-down menus) that implement the what-you-see-is-what-you-get idea have remained the same. Nevertheless, our everyday life is 3D, therefore a natural interface would be a three dimensional one. Three-dimension will be a characteristic of future user interfaces, although we are just starting to gain an understanding of how users can navigate and share information within a virtual 3D environment. Threedimensional graphical user interfaces (3D-GUI) raise many issues of design, metaphor and usability. This research is devoted to designing a 3D-GUI as a frontend tool for a file management system, in this case, for Microsoft Windows© Explorer; as well as evaluating the efficiency of a 3D application. The software design was implemented by extending the Half-Life 3D engine. This extension provides a directory traversal and basic file management functions, like “cut”, “copy”, “paste”, “delete”, and so on. This paper shows the design and implementation of a real-world application that contains an efficient 3D-GUI. To gain perspective of the current situation it is necessary to look at the properties of the desktop metaphor. The user interface exists in the xy-plane, thus giving it two dimensions (and four degrees of freedom). Because of the overlapping of several independent windows, a pseudo z-plane is defined through the obscuring of “background” windows. Thus a full third dimension does not exist, but it is not limited to two dimensions either. It is somewhere in between; in fact, this has become a pseudo-2.5D user interface [2].