Elf Sternberg

User created content. What made SL popular is not the graphics (sucky) or the reliability (way sucky) or the interface (are we sensing a pattern yet?). What launched it to prominence was that anybody could create anything they could imagine, own it, and sell it to other people. For all it's faults -- and there are plenty -- that simple little addition of the capitalist way turned what would have otherwise been a neat note in techhistory into an actual viable alternative world.

But for all the promise of a 3D interface, my experience inworld has been that expanding into 3D does nothing but clutter things up. Only so much can be visible at a time, and that is a 2D flat set of icons, buttons, etc. While I've experimented with a HUD that has multiple controls that come to the foreground or background as they are needed, in the end, that's nothing more than a Tabbed set of menus. Except for being able to wander through all the menus possible within a room, a 3D UI simply doesn't help the user do anything. In fact, walking around and around looking for the FILE menu is rather slow compared to simply selecting it from a menu with a mouse.