The complexity and the consistency of the user interface for the whole application must be weighed in the decision. Most of the pattern-perception machinery of the visual system operates in 2D, not in 3D, and for this fundamental reason even when a 3D view is being used it is critical to understand what pattern information appears on the 2D image plane.ĭeciding whether or not to use a 3D display must involve deciding whether there are sufficient important subtasks for which 3D is clearly beneficial. The other depth cues, such as occlusion and linear perspective, certainly help us perceive a coherent 3D space, but as the study of Cockburn and McKenzie (2001) suggests, we should not automatically assume that 3D provides more readily accessible information. In the case of networks, a network several times larger can be perceived with stereo and motion parallax cues, although even here, if interaction with nodes is critical, interactive 2D methods are likely to be superior. Of all the depth cues, motion parallax is the one most likely to enable us to see more information, but only for certain cognitive tasks. This suggests a small increase in the amount of information through the use of stereo viewing.

We may only be able to stereoscopically fuse images that differ by 10%, usually much less.

On a 2D plane of the same display, we can display 1000 × 1000 = 1,000,000 pixels, but going to a 3D stereoscopic display only increases the number of pixels by a factor of 2, and this does not double the available information because the two images must be highly correlated for us to perceive stereoscopic depth. On a one-dimensional line of a computer display, we can perceive 1000 distinct pixels. Nevertheless, it also should be cautioned that going from 2D to 3D adds far less visual information than might be supposed. It is always possible to flatten out part of a 3D display and represent it in 2D. The 3D design space is richer than the 2D design space, because a 2D space is a part of 3D space.

The strongest argument for the ultimate ascendancy of 3D visualization systems, and 3D user interfaces in general, must be that we live in a 3D world and our brains have evolved to recognize and interact within 3D. We still lack design rules for 3D environments, and many interaction techniques are competing for adoption. Creating a 3D visualization environment is considerably more difficult than creating a 2D system with similar capabilities. High-quality, interactive stereoscopic displays are now inexpensive, although even mediocre-quality virtual-reality systems are still expensive. Colin Ware, in Information Visualization (Fourth Edition), 2021 Conclusion

3-d viewer for monitor