Quote from: WASasquatch on July 27, 2018, 01:01:53 PM
You're still explaining personal problems, that are inherent to you, not everyone. People have plainly said it doesn't bother them, like me. I can see the preview just fine.
He is not speaking solely for himself, myself and others have already made similar comments. Calling his comments a "personal problem, that are inherent to you, not everyone" is dismissive to him as well as others of us who've made similar comments.
These are general usability problems he's relating, and contrary to your assertion, not everyone else is "fine" with Terragen as it is in that regard. The whole point of the post I had to split into multiple parts was to give multiple examples for different scenarios where the general lack of "standard" 3D placement/orientation tools made many different aspects of Terragen much more difficult to use than necessary.
He's referring to a specific case, but his specific case is part of a genre of problems I mentioned as well. He's
not the only user who finds this genre of issues a problem in daily use, there are many more (including myself). Further, some of the forum posts where others report difficult with the existing inputs, are themselves also scenarios where access to more standard 3D interactive placement/orientation interfaces would mitigate or even eliminate their problems.
One of the problems with strict numeric entry is that the preview/RTP views do not really provide a good means of visualizing where specific locations fall within Terragen's "world coordinate space". If you start doing any sort of serious look at 3D inputs and interaction efficiencies (look at SIGCHI, ACM, IEEE for starters) you'll see there's been a LOT of research into the efficiencies of different means of navigating within and controlling placement/orientation of entities in multiscale 3D environments (which is what Terragen manifests). To say that research has shown manual input of numeric values as primary means of 3D positioning/orientation is inefficient would be an
immense understatement. Even the most basic in-environment mechanisms for 3D manipulation are vastly more efficient and give users much greater situational awareness of how their actions fit into the overall environment.
Matt / Oshyan, I'd strongly recommend at least perusing the following papers:
Luca Chittaro , Roberto Ranon , Lucio Ieronutti,
3D object arrangement for novice users: the effectiveness of combining a first-person and a map view, Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, November 18-20, 2009, Kyoto, Japan
Taylor Sando , Melanie Tory , Pourang Irani,
Effects of animation, user-controlled interactions, and multiple static views in understanding 3D structures, Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, September 30-October 02, 2009, Chania, Crete, Greece
Melanie Tory, Torsten Moller, M. Stella Atkins, and Arthur E. Kirkpatrick. 2004.
Combining 2D and 3D views for orientation and relative position tasks. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 73-80. DOI=
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/985692.985702Melanie Tory , Arthur E. Kirkpatrick , M. Stella Atkins , Torsten Moller,
Visualization Task Performance with 2D, 3D, and Combination Displays, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.12 n.1, p.2-13, January 2006
Tina Ziemek, Sarah Creem-Regehr, William Thompson, and Ross Whitaker. 2012.
Evaluating the effectiveness of orientation indicators with an awareness of individual differences. ACM Trans. Appl. Percept. 9, 2, Article 7 (June 2012), 23 pages. DOI=
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2207216.2207218James McCrae, Michael Glueck, Tovi Grossman, Azam Khan, and Karan Singh. 2010.
Exploring the design space of multiscale 3D orientation. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '10), Giuseppe Santucci (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 81-88. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1145/1842993.1843008They explore improvement areas where Terragen has some specific issues, including users' navigation of their view position in terms of the world coordinate space, general placement/orientation of objects in 3D environments, and in terms of helping users understand general spatial relationships and orientations in a "big picture" sense. A couple also touch on why relying on a single 3D view is inefficient/problematic for users in 3D navigation / placement / orientation tasks.
I leave the research into why nigh-all 2D & 3D apps have abandoned numeric entry of coordinates and measurements as a
primary means of areal/spatial placement/orientation, and now support it as a secondary "special use case" mechanism, to the reader.
You'll need to go back to the 90s and before, but there is actually a fairly decent amount of research metrics still available explaining why interactive, in-view UI approaches replaced numeric entry of coordinates and orientations as primary input mechanisms among CAD and Visualization applications (2D & 3D), and slightly later in the then-infant 2D & 3D graphics/media application market.
Hint: Those changes had
nothing to do with wanting to make CAD and Visualization apps' UIs "fancier" (irrelevant, to those markets' customers), and just about everything to do with maximizing productivity and "comprehensibility" while minimizing user errors -- among the
highest priority concerns of customers in the CAD and Visualization markets.
