Nsider display showing two abstract views of a head model
The nsider is an interesting offshoot of the research of the ACG that was born from thinking about creating a new type of display space for presenting multidimensional information across many perspectives. By playing with people's everyday experience of viewing objects from multiple directions, deeply layered information spaces can be presented as actual slices across four distinct perspectives. Thus three-dimensional space is not used to present the illusion of a real world object, but as a way of orienting a person through a complicated information model which may or may not be three dimensional in nature.
Interestingly, the underlying technology of the exhibit itself is not particularly striking. In our current prototype, the display is composed of four inexpensive LCD monitors and one consumer grade Macintosh. Rather the innovation is the configuration of this equipment into a new interactive display space that provides a different type of information presentation.