navigating dataland

Moving away from the hardware, the virtual space is dubbed "Dataland," and consists of a 2 1/2D plane with ports that offer access to additional panes. One of the nearby TV monitors will always show the full world view, and the room's large screen functions as a window onto that selected surface. To the left, you can see a prototype of that view from another paper around the same time, "A Prototype Spatial Data Management System." Compared to Lion's multiple desktops, for example, the primary screen would show just a single desktop, while all of your other desktops would be visible and just a touch away on a nearby monitor. The system offers two primary ways of navigation: the joystick lets users fly with "helicopter-like" flight over the data landscape, or the user can simply touch a section on the world view to be transported directly. You can also navigate through portals in each level to "lower" levels.

While they're not updating dynamically, maps aren't a far cry from the Google Maps we know today. Pushing forward on the left joystick zooms in on the map, and the auxiliary monitor provides a larger world view so that you know exactly what part of a map you're zoomed in on. Also familiar is an image "blockiness" that appears while moving in, but gets replaced with a clean image due to the "digital nature of the television image."

Even in the 1970s there were concerns about the page swipe being nostalgic and frivolous

Many of the user interface ideas that we use today are seen here, almost fully formed. The debates still raging over ebook design and reading interfaces are also considered here, and page 31 even reveals a page swipe animation initiated by the stroke of a finger. Note that even in the 1970s there were concerns about the page swipe being nostalgic and frivolous. Bolt writes, "the intent is not to give a nostalgic impression of the way books used to look, like the electric fireplace with back-lit logs." He goes on to say continuous scrolling doesn't give readers a good sense of reading progress, and page-flipping provides effective, direct feedback.

Glyphs (early icons) sit on the Dataland surface and represent different data types. An on-screen, touch-based calculator provides all the functions. Zooming in on the black-and-white Sony television glyph brings live video up, letting the viewer watch (p. 35) "Columbo, The Sting, or a documentary on how to stop smoking." Anything that can be viewed on this virtual set can be recorded and played back at any time, perfect for when the operator wants to "view the twelve o'clock news, or see a rerun of some footage that was taped earlier." How far we've come.