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Comment by lanternfish | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. Now I'm curious if you could actually get a 3d interface with all that information dynamically rendered running with reasonable performance on period accurate personal hardware - it's definitely in the scope of the 95 demo scene stuff.

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This is the vision of the cybersecurity company i'm working for, to render information systems in a 3d interface. It works fine on mid-range hardware and can render assets (hardware and linked users) in the thousands, for more you'd have to segment your interface in secondary instances.

It's mainly for SecOps team tho, can't go full matrix yet on your home network.

Circa 2000 I interviewed for a three-letter-acronym agency that shall remain unnamed and they were interested in me working on a 3D visualization interface of traffic across a network which actually sounded pretty fascinating. Sort of like "packet filter plus visualization" after given physical location information about the computers in question; even without that information, though, it would use something like the graphviz algorithm (or one of its options) to lay out the map on a 2D plane in 3D. Different kinds of traffic was color-coded, you could zoom in and inspect any stream, roll forward or backwards in history, etc.

  A s/TV network/Three Letter Agency/ that wishes to remain nameless
  
  We have no names, man, no names. We are nameless. Can I score a fry? Thanks.

3D interfaces so far usually mean you navigate a 3D model of some digital space which appears to you behind a 2D screen accessible with a keyboard and a mouse which are 3D physical objects in your 3D real world (keyboard,video,mouse).

3D interfaces are quit different without the 2D screen barrier and either your are inside the experience (VR) or the experience is outside around you (MR/AR).

While I loved the 3D imagination of the 90s, 3D navigation is not the shortest way to the needed information. Imagine your file structure would be organized like a video game? It's the same reason why transparent touch screens and VR doesn't really work.

You need a working Z-buffer and then it could be pretty fast. S3 Trio came out in 1995 too and was decent enough.

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