Raw

Well, I'm all in favour of a time-line view of sequential events, and putting genuine geographical data on a map.



But I'm not so convinced beyond this.



The great thing about 2D is that it *simplifies* information for the user. About the only place 3D really works is in games, because that's where people are explicitly looking to have their life "complexified". The main value a third dimension is that some things can be hidden behind other things, which is useful when you want the thrill of the monster jumping out of a concealed door, but just a pain when you can't see the piece of data you're looking for because something else is in front of it.



3D renderings of chemical molecules are a special case : those molecules really *are* objects in a 3D space, whose geometric properties are important for how they interact. And people want to have a feel for that.



Generic graph-shaped data isn't mappable onto a 3D space. And any attempt to do so won't actually highlight any "real" feature of the world or the data, but will simply present artifacts due to the mapping algorithm itself.





@en