From: Mark Young <m.y@mindspring.com>
Date: August 6, 2003 5:03:09 PM EDT
To: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Is there any standard in VR?
Reply-To:
mark@vizmo.com

I am unaware of any standards. SGI had a 3D UI guide that was part of their product docs, but it was really just a style guide.

Frankly, I think its too early for standards since there is still so much room for improvement in 3D widgets. Even though all of the commercial desktop 3D packages have similar interactions for various operations (camera orbit, object rotation, etc.), users are still forwarding plenty of complaints and wishes regarding fundamentals of the widgets. I work on UI for 3ds max and regularly discuss these issues with hundreds of artists and designers who use the interactions all day, every day - they would hate to hear that we're done designing the gizmos.

The virtual trackball is a good example since it seems like one of the best candidates for a standard. But when we gave one for the first time to max users, many artists had problems with the traditional implementation - many wished for a linear relationship between pixel-distance dragged and degrees rotated (see http://www.vizmo.com/rgizmo.html). It might even be wise to abandon the trackball and switch to a lever metaphor since the trackball does work well when the pivot is off screen (not unusual in animation scenarios). There is a similar story for each of the other widgets. With more degrees-of-freedom comes more design choices and we're bound to have made a lot of mistakes thus far.

Mark

-------Original Message-------
From: Marc Bernatchez <marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca>
Sent: 08/06/03 08:25 AM
To: 3DUI <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>
Subject: Is there any standard in VR?


Hi all, I'm currently looking for the existence of standards in the VE/VR

field. Is there such a thing as a VR standard?

I interested in hardware standards as well as software ones. Specifically,
on the software side, is there any standard yet? Agreed, we have OpenGL,
but
this standard is not directly related to VR. I'm talking about
higher-level
standards for user interface and user interaction (IT's). Things like
standard 3D UI toolkits libraries for VR.

Any info / remark / thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Marc Bernatchez
Ph.D. candidate
Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
CANADA
marc.bernatchez@polymtl.ca