9monkeys c9ag id="356595" link="mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/0/UsabilityAtMicrosoft.wmv"
Summary: Creating a control that implements the 3D carousel interface seen in a C9 video

Watch Simon Guest - Mainframe Interop with Avalon and fast-forward to 27:40 to see them talk about a Hierarchical Carousel Viewer.

Research

Description

Following is the description from the video:
So Simon called me in and said "alright, I need some UI help here." He told me this scenario, and we had this thing called the Hierarchical Carousel Viewer. What it is is a control you can plug in to and basically you're able to navigate hierachical data and so you started a node and you can navigate down to a deeper node in the heirarchy and traverse a hierachy. Very common, lots of data sets that can fit into this. But what's interesting is the visual aspect, the style aspect. Whenever people, a lot of people have seen this demo say "Wow! This is a much more compelling way to visualize data."

Mock-up

http://www.middaysoftware.com/MinhsBlogs/directgallery/carousel.jpg

Interaction Videos

* Rotate_rotate.wmv
* Context Menu_menu.wmv
* Expand and Rotateexpandand_rotate.wmv
* Scroll Backscrollback.wmv
* Split Treesplittree.wmv
* 6/1/2005 Prototypeproto050601.wmv
* 6/16/2005 Prototype_20050616.gif - Motion sickness is noticeable.

Papers

MS Research has published a pdf on this interface Designing a Generalized 3D Carousel View

Technology

We want smooth 3D graphics accessible on a ""WinForm"", so most likely, we'll have to use ""Managed DirectX"" to render a 3D scene to a panel control so that we can encapsulate the whole thing inside a user control.

Implementation Ideas

Damn that would look great on a hardware or Network visualization applet in the control panel! There was a build of Longhorn that once used one of these... then the whole Longhorn production team took 93 steps backwards. Damnit.

http://www.geocities.com/khamul337/c9host/ctrlLonghorn.jpg