3d Data

qsmith

I often have an Idea in my head, when working with documentation. When I try and visualise it in my mind it seems to be 3-dimensional, and I am frustrated trying to document it in a 2d space. I have seen some Flash websites that have a few words in a 3d space, but not large volumes of data. And these sites take very long to download on slow bandwidth connections.

Has anyone come across something that lets you model information in a 3d space without needing lots of resources?

LukeakaDanish

Some alternative / experimental desktop enviroments include 3d workspaces - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XGL for an example (or watch a youtube movie: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cz_2vKq5cZk). There are also even more 3d systems like bumptop: http://youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ

As for web based 3d though, I don't think its possible - at least not without some pretty hefty loading and developement in a flash based enviroment - although examples of 3d done in javascript have been generated, it is generally just not fast enough for that kind of thing.

chasbeen

qsmith:-
The documentatiom "floating" in your 3d scene interests me.
I would like to know what tools you are using?
Have you a 3D scene on an HTML page or even a moving 3D scene on an html page?
Might be able to help and use small bandwidth. Idea

pudding

If you are advanced try streaming the data. For example let the idea your working on first fade in so it is unclear and you can't see that certain textures or so aren't loaded yet. Only load what is visible the first 30 frames or so, then load the rest.