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Comment by zbendefy | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the 3D file browser user interface in Jurassic Park, which was an actual application. Looks cool but its not good to use (I mean the 3d file browser, not this software galaxies, which i found quite good).

3D interfaces rarely plan out, wonder if something like a vision pro or quest could make a 3D user interface work better than a 2D counterpart.

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https://fsv.sourceforge.net

There's a great write up at https://scifiinterfaces.com/2023/11/27/jurassic-park-1993/

IIRC it was an SGI application - very cool but not terribly practical!

To be fair, it was all new back then and people were playing with ideas, so a 3d file browser seemed like a cool idea. A bit like the metal roller on the Paris Metro ticket machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=9SjBfRA3YzA

The discoverability on those things is definitely lacking. I think it took us five or so broken touch-screens before my wife noticed that you could use that to select menu options instead! I guess once you know it's fine though? Feels a bit dated compared to the typical touch & go card payments elsewhere in Europe now though.

I couldn't work it out for a good while, because it's the most unintuitive UI I have found on reasonably recent ticket machines. Once you know how to use it, it's ok.

ProTip: if you travel from London on a train, the buffet sells Paris Metro tickets.

Looks like it's "File System Navigator" or fsn (fusion)

https://web.archive.org/web/20160416092919/https://en.wikipe...

Since removed, but still mentioned here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface#In_sc...

Can be seen here (@8.02): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PP--lVTPCQ&t=482s

(A $36,000 Graphical Workstation from 1993 | SGI Indigo 2)

There was a bunch of "demo" applications bundled in Irix, some more some less useful, that were used to showcase the capabilities of the systems. File System Navigator was, afaik, one of them (similarly there was bundled "dogfight", a networked flight simulator game).

Yes, it was a SGI application. Probably used in the movie Hackers.

There was also a Doom file manager where you'd use BFG to nuke a directory. I only found one for Doom 3 but this also existed with original Doom. Nowadays, BFG is only used to nuke git repos.

Doom process managers where a thing for a while too, 20 years ago. Using the BFG on a crowded room of processes usually resulted in a system crash. Hunting down a stuck program and shooting it in E1M1 was pretty neat though. Your comment reminded me of playing with this in MacOS X a long time ago.

> https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

There's also Doom as an Interface for Process Management https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

In VR, there was a wave of that kind of thing (3D productivity apps, file browsers etc.) None really took off though as far as I can tell.

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