Back in the days when Second Life was being hyped as the future of the web, Clay Shirky quipped that "3D is a crappy way to search." I totally agree, in part because I've often had the experience of looking for something in my house, which came with the three standard spatial dimensions, and wishing I could search these dimensions the same way I search the web: textually.
The shortcomings of 3D search were brought home to me when I stumbled across the Seed Gives Life site. The site itself consists of a semi-explorable faux 3D Flash landscape which looks cool, but is kind of frustrating because, although you can poke around a bit in their pretty pastel forest, there isn't much to actually find there.
Then I found their blog and came across this post, msnbc's Ess feed viewer is pretty awesome." Turns out that msnbc is using an interesting technology, Spectra. which allows you to create a 3D newsfeed. Interestingly enough, since the feed can get kind of crowded, making in difficult to pick out the individual items of interest, they provide you with a tool that allows you to filter the feed view using, tah dah, text-based search.
Promise: 3D can provide a rich and imaginative interface.
Peril: It can be just as cluttered, obscure, and user-unfriendly as reality's own 3D interface.
Solution: Infuse the wonderfully awkward and beautifully frustrating tri-dimensional world (or its digital surrogate) with the awesome power of the hyper-dimensional world (sometimes called "the web").
Image Courtesy of advencap.
that good opinion and very reasonable ..