Project Looking Glass Revisited
Thanks to Brent, Michael, and others, my Project Looking Glass post generated a fair amount of interest, and some interesting comments (thanks to everyone who participated!). Because of the level of interest, I feel compelled to continue beating the horse by responding to two criticisms (one potential and one actual).
The first thing I’d like to address is what I fear might be taken as a disconnect between my Looking Glass post and one of my first posts way back in February, which defended Apple’s frequent invention of “non-standard” UI widgets in the iApps. No one has mentioned it, but I realize that the opinion I express there (that after 20 years of desktop interfaces, absolute UI consistency might not quite be as all-important as it once was) could appear to be at odds with my claim to be a “traditionalist.”
If this is what anyone is thinking, fine: I abdicate my claim to UI traditionalism. The rest of what I say is still consistent, though. I consider things like iPhoto’s “zooming” mechanism and Exposé to be examples of what I described in my last post as innovating within a traditional desktop framework, rather than going for radical reinvention. By contrast, I consider what Sun is doing to be closer to Lifestreams or (and I know this is a loaded example) Microsoft Bob: an attempt to fundamentally change the metaphors people use to interact with their machines. In the case of Project Looking Glass, Sun appears to be favoring a more literal, “real world” approach.
This comparison between Apple’s and Sun’s approaches brings me to the second thing I want to address: Eric Hancock has posted a response to my critique, in which he argues that I’ve judged Project Looking Glass using only my personal likes and dislikes as a standard. For example, he questions my emphasis on heuristics and speed, arguing that sometimes people simply want to browse freely without a specific target in mind, and that Sun’s 3D interface is superior for that sort of thing.
Eric definitely has a good point there: it is easy for me to forget that just because I don’t personally like to use the “Browse” feature in iTunes, that doesn’t mean there aren’t users who swear by it. I might even go so far as to agree that the browsing functionality could sometimes be more useful if it displayed an album’s cover along with it’s name. What I still won’t buy into, however, is the idea that 3D would improve the browsing experience.
When it comes down to it, what does 3D buy us in the GUI? Maybe I’m just missing something big (and I’m sure someone will point it out if I am), but it seems to me that the only significant benefit of a 3D interface is the ability to create a sort of “virtual reality” environment, where things look and are manipulated more like real world objects. And, as I’ve explained, I think that approach is both unnecessary and undesirable for most purposes.
I’ll be the first to admit I could be wrong, though. It is very possible that my criticisms of Project Looking Glass represent a huge failure of the imagination. Only time (and, as Eric points out, user testing) will tell.