3greeneggs

I was reading The Guardian’s interview with Richard Bartle on the state of virtual worlds this morning, when I followed Richard’s link to 3D Mailbox.

3D Mailbox creates a Sims-like character for each of your incoming messages. They meet a bouncer, who either directs them to the pool - where the good messages swim, waiting for you to read them - or the beach, where the spam messages are eaten by sharks. You can store your dripping, sexy messages in a cabana, or banish them to the graffiti-infested garbage alley.

This is either 1) a gratuitous use of 3D technology for an application that has done quite well as completely text-based, thank you very much, or 2) a new way to interact with your e-mail.

3D Mailbox was created by the same people who developed Visitorville, a tool to visualize your web server stats in 3D. Seeing a crowd of human beings is a bit more intuitive than seeing a bar chart. I do think e-mail is a bit of a different application, as we don’t usually pay individual attention to each entry in a log file, as we do with e-mail, and the information in e-mail is much richer (though that doesn’t seem to be supported by the environment).

A message on Linspire indicates that this program was inspired by an application on SGI machines; if I recall correctly, that utility was intended more to show off the graphics capabilities of those machines. Is this another old-skool Unix utility returning to life as a web application?

Overall, this seems to add an unecessary layer of abstraction to a very usable application. Text, or even HTML, does a very good job at presenting text-based rich information. It is very important to consider what the 3D environment really offers besides being shiny.

Now, if the program actually parsed and semantically analyzed the messages, then used that in the visualization, we might be on to something.

Oh, and the interview is worth reading, too.