3d interface

Microsoft Research demonstrates holoportation, which reconstructs and compresses high-quality 3D models of people in real time and sends them anywhere. With a HoloLens, remote participants appear as if present in your room.

A Computer History Museum oral history panel with four 3dfx founders on the company's rise with Voodoo Graphics and Glide, and its fall into bankruptcy. It runs about two and a half hours.

Real Engineering explains the materials science behind metal 3D printing, including crystal structure, laser sintering, and why printed parts develop fatigue cracks. It shows how process imperfections limit the strength of printed metal.

A GDC 2015 talk by Arc System Works technical artist Junya Motomura on how Guilty Gear Xrd rebuilt a classic 2D fighter in full 3D while keeping a hand-drawn look. It covers the art and programming R&D and the stylistic decisions behind it.

A short demo of a 3D Wayland compositor built with Qt 5 and QtWayland, mapping input to and compositing the output of Wayland applications in a 3D scene, also running on a Raspberry Pi.

A short Insider Tech video on New Story and ICON building 3D-printed homes that can go up in under 24 hours for around $4,000. It frames the effort as a way to address global homelessness.

Bisqwit builds a Doom or Duke Nukem 3D style software-rendered 3D engine in C from scratch, supporting non-Euclidean geometry. It covers vector rotation and portal rendering with sped-up, tool-assisted coding.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Tantacrul dissects the UX and UI of Avid's Sibelius music notation software, going through a long list of bad design choices. The review is both a comic rant and a practical lesson in interface design.

Adam Savage shows off his collection of analog calculators, ending with a 3D-printed, scaled reproduction of the Curta mechanical calculator built by Marcus Wu. The video examines the replica and the engineering behind it.

A short explainer from Nat and Friends on where Google Earth's 3D imagery comes from, how it is stitched together, and how often it is updated. It describes aircraft carrying camera rigs and photogrammetry that turns the photos into 3D models.

A short screen recording of an Ubuntu Karmic Koala desktop running KDE4 with Compiz Fusion 3D cube effects and CairoDock.

A 1997 Computer History Museum lecture in which Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa recount how the Apple human interface was born, from the Lisa through the Macintosh. It covers design decisions such as discoverability and the standard editing keys.

Linus Tech Tips reviews the Looking Glass 8K holographic display, a glasses-free 3D monitor. The video shows the display in action and explains how it works.

A one-minute demo of Safespaces, an open source 3D and VR desktop built on the Arcan project.

A demo of the Symbolics Graphics Division's S-Packages, a Lisp-based 3D color graphics and animation system from the 1980s. It was later used in developing for the Nintendo 64.

Tantacrul gives a detailed UX and UI design review of the MuseScore 3 notation software and compares it with Sibelius. It examines visual appeal, navigation and notation quality.

A SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 research demo of 3-Sweep, a tool for extracting editable 3D objects from a single photo using a few user strokes. It predates modern AI image tools.

Erik Meijer argues that category theory is the mathematicians' version of interface-based design. He shows that Java 8 lambdas and method references form a Cartesian closed category.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

A promotional video for Leap, the navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin, demonstrated on the Canon Cat computer around 1987. It shows keyboard-driven search and cursor positioning in place of a mouse.

Andrew Price presents at the Blender conference on the problems, politics and possible fixes for Blender's user interface, followed by a full Q&A. He argues that an interface upgrade is overdue.

Google ATAP's short 2014 introduction to Project Tango, a mobile device effort to give phones and tablets a human-scale understanding of space and motion. It pitches ideas like indoor navigation and games that interact with your physical space.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

Gameplay footage of Zarch, the 1987 3D Defender-like game by David Braben for the Acorn Archimedes. It shows the 256-colour 3D landscape where you stop landers spreading a virus.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

A one-minute clip of the Jurassic Park scene where a girl navigates the FSN 3D file manager on an SGI system and declares it a Unix system.

A Strange Loop talk presenting an open-source library that integrates Clojure into the Unity 3D game engine. It covers REPL-based live coding, macros, DSLs and persistent data structures for game development.

A Community clip in which Dean Pelton explores a virtual reality environment, including a blooper moment.

A TV show about Ivan Sutherland's 1963 MIT thesis software Sketchpad, which ran on the TX-2 computer. It shows a light pen drawing, constraints, snapping, scaling and object-style graphics, foundations of GUIs and CAD.

Russ Cox gives a 23-minute tour of the Acme text editor from Plan 9, showing its mouse-driven interface, executing commands from text, and its filesystem-based interface to other programs.

Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.

3Blue1Brown builds visual intuition for quaternions, showing how to think about this four-dimensional number system using stereographic projection and rotations in 3D space. It is part one of a two-part series with an interactive companion site.

Matt Adereth's Clojure/conj talk covers the history of keyboards and how he used Clojure generating OpenSCAD to design and build his custom Dactyl ergonomic keyboard, including 3D printing and laser-cut parts.

Casey Muratori's 2005 video introducing immediate-mode GUIs as an alternative to retained widget toolkits. He explains the motivation and shows minimal-state button logic.

A three-minute Emacs Rocks screencast demonstrating Magit, the Git interface inside Emacs, including staging and other everyday operations.

Overdrive 2 by TiTAN, a Sega Mega Drive demo that won first place in the Oldskool competition at Revision 2017. It shows effects and 3D graphics on the stock console.

An animated, profane rant critiquing Windows 8, especially its touch-first interface on desktop PCs. The author draws on a background in tech journalism to lay out the UX problems.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

A University of Tokyo lab demonstrates a book scanner that flips pages automatically and scans over 250 pages per minute. It uses real-time 3D recognition of the flipped pages and then restores each one to a flat image.