Representation in virtual space: visual convention in the graphical user interface

ABSTRACT

The graphical user interface (GUI) typically provides a multi-windowed environment within a flat workspace or “desktop.” Simultaneously, however, controls for executing commands within this interface are increasingly being rendered three-dimensionally. This paper explores ways in which the space of the GUI desktop might be literally and figuratively deepened through the incorporation of visual devices that have emerged during the history of art—specifically, perspective and light effects. By enriching the visual vocabulary of the GUI, greater semantic complexity becomes sustainable.

REFERENCES

• 1: Richard Gregory describes a correspondence between photographic and retinal images that is distinct from that which the artist actually sees. Those images correspond to the +geometric perspective" typically presented in "realistic" art. Apparently, geometric perspective was to become a conventionalized ideal. Richard L. Gregory, "Art and Reality" in Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing, Princeton University Press, 1990, pgs. 171-195.
• 2: Joe Ballay presented historic examples of visual organization within painting at CHI 92's Visual Design SIG meeting, illustrating conventions between layout and meaning transferrable to the GUI.
• 3: While this paper will focus on perspective as developed during the European Rennaissance, the term is also used to describe other types of drawing systems which serve to represent spatial depth. See "Perspective in Art," Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 15th Edition, 1990, Vol. 9, pg. 313.
• 4: Leonardo da Vinci described perspective as "nothing else than the seeing of a plane behind a sheet of glass, smooth and quite transparent, on the surface of which all the things approach the point of the eye in pyramids, and these pyramids are intersected on the glass plane." From Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, Dover Publications, 1970.
• 5: Axonometric and isometric projection are used in drawing to depict objects dimensionally, but without regard to true perspective. Isometric projection places the face of an object parallel to the picture plane, utilizes no vanishing points, and typically ignores foreshortening. Axonometric projection places the face of an object atan angle to the picture plane and displays the top of the object as if in plan (bird's eye) view. New Wave utilizes axonometric projection in its icon drawing style.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Interaction styles (e.g., commands, menus, forms, direct manipulation)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology; Windowing systems

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
art, art history, methodology, representation, three-dimensional graphics, user interfaces