future of alice: interacting with off-screen objects via their insets

There are a lot of reasons why Alice is still in beta. Gabe and I estimated that if we can make 1001 improvements, then Alice3 will cross over into the “good” realm. To date, I’ve gotten 3 of the 1001, so there’s still a long ways to go. For most of the problems with Alice, I have a plan. Sadly, implementing that plan is taking seemingly forever. I’m going to try to start to put some of that plan into words so everyone can:

1. be alerted to problems in the system
2. get a sense for what is coming
3. raise objections and/or suggest improvements

Problem #643: It is really easy to lose objects in the 3D scene.

This, like a lot of problems in Alice, primarily arises from things that land squarely in the “well duh” category that we just simply haven’t gotten to yet. When you create an object from the gallery it sometimes comes in at a seemingly arbitrary location. Obviously, creating an instance by dragging them in and placing them directly (a la Alice2) is on the list. If someone just clicks on the gallery model and Alice needs to place it somewhere, then “front and center” is far better than wherever it happened to be when it was converted from the Alice2 gallery. So take for granted that we’re going to do all that.

Yet, further problems can arise when you are simply trying to move objects around the scene. It is still all too easy when dragging an object to lose it somewhere far, far away on the horizon. Preventing this unwanted, unfortunate plane projection is, of course, the first step. Providing undo will also serve as a great catchall band-aid. But even given that we are going do all of that work, I believe there is still room to improve interacting with off-screen, small, or distant objects via insets.

Let’s say you have a project with a penguin, but it is off-screen.

If you were to select the off-screen penguin, we could provide a little inset. Beyond just being able to view the object and get a sense of where it is, you could interact with the object via the inset (for example: you could drag it back into view if you wanted).

This also could be useful for objects that appeared small in view (due to it’s inherent small size or because it is far away).

We could also provide an inset if the penguin was occluded (say, behind or inside the igloo).

Of course, we don’t want to clutter the window with insets for all objects that are off-screen or small, so this would only happen when the object in question is selected.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination the biggest or most important problem in Alice. It is one of a thousand planned improvements that will (hopefully) make Alice a pleasant and useful system.