ABSTRACT
The 2D screen is a crutch. While having a clear orthographic view of an object or scene can help you compare relative sizes and make the manipulation of 2D menu items more accessible, ultimately, you are working with a distortion of real 3D space. Imagine if you had to walk around all day with a pane of glass in front of you, clicking on icons to eat your breakfast or take the elevator. Now imagine that you can break that glass and step into the world of your 3D digital environment as easily as you walk out of your front door. As we near the first quarter of the 21st century, the artifice of the 2D interface is fading away. Head-mounted display (HMD) devices like Oculus Rift (Oculus VR), Project Morpheus (Sony), and Samsung VR, all under rapid development, will allow you to enter and interact with the virtual world in a 3D space. Apple has patented a 3D gesture-hover-based control for its tablet, eventually allowing you to “pull” a 3D form off the 2D screen. This is one of the many devices that will promote the use of augmented reality (AR), and mobile devices that will break you away from the desktop screen and allow you access to the virtual world from anywhere in the real one [1]. The time has come to think of how your designing process can be enhanced by the display device, and how the real and virtual worlds can coexist in virtual 3D space.
