Andries van Dam

Post-WIMP user interfaces

characterized by four distinguishable interface styles, each lasting for many years and optimized to the hardware available at the time. In the first period, the early 1950s and 1960s, computers were used in batch mode with punched-card input and line-printer output; there were essentially no user interfaces because there were no interactive users (although some of us were privileged to be able to do console debugging using switches and lights as our “user interface”). The second period in the evolution of interfaces (early 1960s through early 1980s) was the era of timesharing on mainframes and minicomputers using mechanical or “glass” teletypes (alphanumeric displays), when for the first time users could interact with the computer by typing in commands with parameters. Note that this era persisted even through the age of personal microcomputers with such operating systems as DOS and Unix with their command line shells. During the 1970s, timesharing and manual command lines remained deeply entrenched, but at Xerox PARC the third age of user interfaces dawned. Raster graphics-based networked workstations and “pointand-click” WIMP GUIs (graphical user interfaces based on windows, icons, menus, and a pointing device, typically a mouse) are the legacy of Xerox PARC that we’re still using today. WIMP GUIs were popularized by the Macintosh in 1984 and later copied by Windows on the PC and Motif on Unix workstations. Applications today have much the same look and feel as the early desktop applications (except for the increased “realism” achieved through the use of drop shadows for buttons and other UI widgets); the main advance lies in the shift from monochrome displays to color and in a large set of software-engineering tools for building WIMP interfaces. I find it rather surprising that the third generation of WIMP user interfaces has been so dominant for more than two decades; they are apparently sufficiently good for conventional desktop tasks that the field is stuck comfortably in a rut. I argue in this essay that the status quo does not suffice—that the newer forms of computing and computing devices available today necessitate new thinking t h e h u m a n c o n n e c t i o n Andries van Dam

Three-dimensional widgets

The 3D components of today’s user interfaces are still underdeveloped. Direct interaction with 3D objects has been limited thus far to gestural picking, manipulation with linear transformations, and simple camera motion. Further, there are no toolkits for building 3D user interfaces. We present a system which allows experimentation with 3D widgets, encapsulated 3D geometry and behavior. Our widgets are first-class objects in the same 3D environment used to develop the application. This integration of widgets and application objects provides a higher bandwidth between interface and application than exists in more traditional UI toolkit-based interfaces. We hope to allow user-interface designers to build highly interactive 3D environments more easily than is possible with today’s tools.

Hypertext '87: keynote address

I’m a Johnny-come-lately to hypertext: I didn’t get started until 1967, and what is especially fun about being here is that I can pay public tribute to the two real trailblazers who have inspired me and hordes of my students who have gone off to do their own independent hypertext projects. The first is the incomparable, one and only Doug Engelbart, who has been working at this since the late 1950s. Many people don’t know that. Some of them may go back in ancient history and remember his mind-blowing demonstration at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, but at that point he had already been working in this area for a decade. And he invented just about everything the rest of us have been doing since then. I will just mention two of his major contributions. The first is office automation: he was doing office automation, in particular word processing, before the terms had even been coined. IBM invented the phrase, in connection with the MCST, the magnetic card selectric typewriter. Word processing was the right term, since words were all you could process. However, you were lucky if you could replace a small word with a larger word and not have it flow off the edges of the card. At that time Doug Engelbart was really working on idea processing. He was, of course, the inventor of outline processing, as it is known today. He had links, he had text searches with a variety of wild-card options. How many of today’s commercial hypertext sys-

Interactive shadows

It is often difficult in computer graphics applications to understand spatial relationships between objects in a 3D scene or effect changes to those objects without specialized visualization and manipulation techniques. We present a set of three-dimensional tools (widgets) called “shadows” that not only provide valuable perceptual cues about the spatial relationships between objects, but also provide a direct manipulation interface to constrained transformation techniques. These shadow widgets provide two advances over previous techniques. First, they provide high correlation between their own geometric feedback and their effects on the objects they control. Second, unlike some other 3D widgets, they do not obscure the objects they control.

Interactive Editing Systems: Part II

Many daily tasks, whether done with conventional tools or with computers, can be wowed as editing tasks: tasks in which the state of some target entity is changed by the user. This article, Par t I of a two-part series, examines computer-based interactwe editing systems, which allow users to change the state of targets such as manuscripts and programs. This paper is a tutorial tha t defines terms and introduces issues for the novice, and provides a reference for the more knowledgeable reader The aun is to provide a comprehensive and systematic view of the features of typical systems, highlighting substantive similarities and differences. User and system views of the editing process are provided, a historical perspective is presented, and the functional capabilities of editors are discussed, with emphasis on user-level rather than implementation-level considerations.

An object-oriented framework for the integration of interactive animation techniques

We present an interactive modeling and animation system that facilitates the integration of a variety of simulation and animation paradigms. This system permits the modeling of diverse objects that change in shape, appearance, and behaviour over time. Our system thus extends modeling tools to include animation controls. Changes can be effected by various methods of control, including scripted, gestural, and behavioral specification. The system is an extensible testbed that supports research in the interaction of disparate control methods embodied in controller objects. This paper discusses some of the issues involved in modeling such interactions and the mechanisms implemented to provide solutions to some of these issues.The systems object-oriented architecture uses delegation hierarchies to let objects change all of their attributes dynamically. Objects include displayable objects, controllers, cameras, lights, renderers, and user interfaces. Techniques used to obtain interactive performance include the use of data-dependency networks, lazy evaluation, and extensive caching to exploit inter- and intra-frame coherency.

The challenges of 3D interaction: a CHI '94 workshop

3D computer graphics is becoming more and more popular due to the increased availability of 3D hardware and software on all classes of computers. However, despite this growing popularity and the existence of a number of successful 3D graphics applications, particularly in CAD, CAE, and medical and scientific visualization, the field is still very immature, There are no widely accepted standards for hardware or software platforms; learning to implement or use 3D graphics software is still extremely laborious; and the most effective ways for humans to interact with synthetic 3D environments are still not clear.

Experiments in Immersive Virtual Reality for Scientific Visualization

Abstract This article provides a snapshot of immersive virtual reality (IVR) use for scientific visualization, in the context of the evolution of computing in general and of user interfaces in particular. The main thesis of this article is that IVR has great potential for dealing with the serious problem of exponentially growing scientific datasets. Our ability to produce large datasets both through numerical simulation and through data acquisition via sensors is outrunning our ability to make sense of those datasets. While our idea of “large” datasets used to be measured in hundreds of gigabytes, based at least in part on what we could easily store, manipulate, and display in real time, todays science and engineering are producing terabytes and soon even petabytes, both from observation via sensors and as output from numerical simulation. Clearly, visualization by itself will not solve the problem of understanding truly large datasets that would overwhelm both display capacity and the human visual system. We advocate a human–computer partnership that draws on the strengths of each partner, with algorithmic culling and feature-detection used to identify the small fraction of the data that should be visually examined in detail by the human. Our hope is that IVR will be a potent tool to let humans “see” patterns, trends, and anomalies in their data well beyond what they can do with conventional 3D desktop displays.

On-line Text Editing: A Survey

This paper is a survey of current methods for the on-line creation and editing of computer programs and of ordinary manuscripts text. The characteristics of on-line editing systems are examined and examples of various implementations are described in three categories: program editors, text editors, and terminals with local editing facilities.

The challenges of 3D interaction

Introduction Applications for viewing and manipulating 3D models and data are increasingly being used by the medical, scientific visualization, modeling and animation communities. The user interfaces to these applications have largely been 2D in nature, borrowing heavily from well-developed 2D user interface paradigms most commonly associated with windowing systems and GUI toolkits such as the Macintosh, Windows and Motif desktop toolkits. Recently, however, some research groups have begun to develop systems for designing and implementing new 3D user interface techniques specifically suited to 3D graphics applications. This emerging area of interface research stands to benefit greatly from organized discussion among researchers in a number of fields including 3D interactive graphics, perceptual psychology and cognitive science.