A friend pointed me to www.screenvader.com which uses a very slick Flash-based UI for navigation. While the 3D-axis isn’t very natural to manipulate with a mouse, which of course is limited to a 2D plane, one can imagine that this would be quite natural if human hand movement could be used as the control mechanism. In fact, this immediately reminded me of so many sci-fi movies, like Minority Report, in which users interface with their computing environment using their hands.

We’re already seeing a trend towards UI’s with 3D perspective such as the “Flip 3D” window-switching feature of Microsoft’s new Aero interface in Vista. In a sense, a 3D is more space efficient since the “depth” of a user’s screen can better be utilized.