New Browser Shows Web in 3-D

P H I L A D E L P H I A, March 5, 2001 -- An architect and virtual reality designer'soutside-the-box idea for a Web browser turned out looking like theinside of a box.

The user-friendly concept of the inside of a room actually ishow Mike Rosen, chief executive officer of 2ce Inc., envisions hismethod of displaying six or more Web pages while being able toinstantly interact with any of them. Instead of opening and minimizing separate browser windows,2ce's CubicEye browser shows the pages as if they were on theinside walls of a cube. A user can flip the cube to work on any page. Pages on thewalls, ceiling and floor of the cube are not fully legible, butthey are live and the user can see changes and click on prominentfeatures. The page directly in front can zoom to full-screen sizefor detailed or extended work. "A lot of information comes at you at once, and what we did waswe came up with an organizational structure that allows you to takethe information overload and organize it in a way that people canrelate to it in a very simplistic fashion," Rosen said.

The Internet Browser Game

Just as Internet browsing previously transformed from dealingwith on-screen text to organizing information in pages or windows,Rosen envisions his browser as a transition to a gaming- orvirtual-reality-oriented three-dimensional approach to the Web,though some experts question whether users want such anevolutionary step. "It may be a misapplied metaphor, the idea that because peopleare familiar with a room they will be comfortable with gettinginformation off the walls, ceiling and floor," said PaulSonderegger, an analyst for Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge,Mass. Rosen called the cube "a simple shape that people arecomfortable with. If I told you look, you're in a room, and theroom has a floor, ceiling and four walls ... you get that. Youunderstand that without me having to teach you too much about yourenvironment." Users gain versatility because they no longer have to navigatefrom page to page in a linear fashion, Rosen said, taking theCubicEye for a spin on his office computer to show how he couldflips from screen to screen without retracing his path. "Now I'm rotating between six sites. And I can go vertically,"he said. "So I'm reading six newspapers at one time. And I'minteracting with all these newspapers. And when I want to read itreal carefully I'm just going to zoom in all the way and read itlike a regular browser." Users can save cubes for regular use, arraying shopping sites tofind the best deal on a desired item, combining news pages in aninformation cube, or displaying several financial sites for quickcomparison. "Literally this could be set up as a mall, too. Each one ofthese pages could be a different store. Or you can be chatting withthree people and browsing the Internet on the other screens,"Rosen said. People who don't want to read six newspapers may be moreinterested in a future capability Rosen envisions by tying thetechnology in with cable television: Watching five games at once. "The second thing we are doing is developing software-developertoolkits so that Web developers will be able to create content.They'll come up with applications that I couldn't even dream of,for their own purposes," Rosen said. "For example, think of astock analyst, they'll want a ticker to wrap around the walls ofthis thing."

Analyst: Worryingly Complex

Chris Le Tocq, an analyst with the Gartner Group in Stamford,Conn., said many users may balk at manipulating cubes, however. Computers need to get simpler to use, not more complicated, andeven with current browsers "there is too much knowledge assumed bythe designers," Le Tocq said. "We've got a long, long way to goto get a user interface right. Both Microsoft and Apple could bedoing a lot more work than they are." Stock traders, for example, can get the information they needwithout learning to manipulate a new browser, Le Tocq said. "They have multiple LCD screens and they are perfectlyreadable," he said. "If this is really important to you, you caneasily invest in the hardware to make it work. If it is not soimportant that you would pay for the hardware I am not sure youwould tolerate the strangeness of the display." Rosen said visitors to 2ce's Web site already have beendownloading up to one copy a minute of a test version of CubicEye,however. He said some analysts and reporters viewed a demonstrationversion at the November Comdex show in Las Vegas. He plans a publicunveiling at the March 12-16 Internet World conference in LosAngeles.