rant: 3D web interfaces

PaperVision is one of the premium 3D-in-the-browser technologies going, and it's a great technology, but a huge segment of the designers using it need to wake up and smell their purpose in life.

As a designer of any sort of user interface, whether a car, a kitchen appliance, or a web page, you have a mission to make the item easy to use. in the case of a web page this usually means making it easy to navigate the information contained in the page. As we all know, many designers who use flash tend to put the technology before the user, adding transitions and UI devices which do not actually assist the user in using the page, but may look sort of neat.

With PaperVision, the tendency to obfuscate user interface has really been given wings. Today's showcase post on the PaperVision site is a perfect example of the abuse of 3D: http://blog.papervision3d.org/2009/03/26/freedom-and-partners .
(I think) it's a page "showcasing" the work done by a web design firm, and comes in both a 2D and a 3D flavour. The 2D flavour suffers from the usual encumbrances of bombastic flash design, but it's the 3D version which the PaperVision blog is lauding: "Their recently launched home site is a very interesting navigation experience, using all axis to display information with vector text and graphics. Very inspirational and well executed."

This is a perfect illustration of a common misconception among people who have not worked extensively with 3D, and is a bit surprising to hear from the PaperVision folks themselves. The misconception is that something is automatically better if it's 3D. Many things certainly benefit greatly from translation into 3D: medical imaging, simulation of spaces like cockpits or architecture, games with a spatial bent, certain datasets, etc.
But many things suffer when moved out of 2D, notably Text, 2D Images, and web User Interfaces. In freedom-and-partner's page, the third dimension is adding no value beyond a little bit of gee-whiz, and in exchange making the task of navigating the site an order of magnitude more difficult.

Another good example of detrimental use of 3D is another page highlighted on the PaperVision blog: http://dailypv3d.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/kt

I've already posted a similar rant on that page, and i'll copy the concluding sentence from that rant here.

I supplicate the design community and especially influential people who should know better like PaperVision itself:

please, for the love of god, think clearly about what a 3D interface is really contributing to whatever user experience you’re designing;
you might realize that it's not actually helping your users.