SpaceTime

» see spacetime3d.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

SpaceTime turned a list into a hallway. You typed a search, and instead of ten blue links it fetched the first ten results as ten live, rendered web pages and hung them one behind the other in a three-dimensional space you could rotate and fly through. Tabs worked the same way. Every page you had open was a card in a stack floating in front of you, and switching was a matter of grabbing one and pulling it forward.

Eddie Bakhash built it and SpaceTime 3D, Inc. shipped the public beta on 4 June 2007. It ran on Windows 2000 through Vista, and it drove the stack with real graphics hardware, which in 2007 was still an unusual thing for a browser to ask for. The 3D search hooked into Google and Yahoo, and into Flickr and eBay too, so an image search became a wall of actual images rather than a page describing them.

The press took it seriously enough to file it under interesting. The San Jose Mercury News wrote it up the day it launched. TechCrunch, a day later, landed on the phrase everybody reused afterward: pure eye candy, sort of like Second Life meets Firefox. Katherine Boehret reviewed it in the Wall Street Journal in March 2008. PCWorld gave it two and a half out of five that summer and said what most people eventually said, which is that it was gorgeous and slow.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The demo was undeniable and the use case never showed up. Once you had watched your ten results swing past in perspective a few times, you noticed that reading the one you wanted still meant pulling it to the front and looking at a flat page, which is what a browser tab already was. The 3D part happened in the three seconds between deciding to search and deciding what to read, and nobody had complained about those three seconds.

It also cost you. Rendering ten full web pages as live textures was expensive on a 2007 laptop, and the machines that could do it comfortably were gaming machines, whose owners were not looking for a better way to read search results.

~ the fall ~

The company's own blog stopped on 16 October 2009 with a post about improvements to the visual search interface. A final build tagged Release Client 1 appeared on 10 June 2010 and that was the end of the shipping. The patent came through the same month, number 7,735,018, which is the usual order of events for a product like this: the intellectual property outlives the software by a wide margin.

~ what is still standing ~

spacetime3d.com answers today. It is the same page from 2010 on the same dark gray background, a screenshot of a BMW site shuffled into a 3D stack above a form asking you to sign up for the beta by entering your email below. The footer still says Patent Pending, Copyright SpaceTime3D, Inc.

Somebody has been back, though. Every occurrence of the name in the page's alt text has been replaced with the bare word "3D", so the images now announce themselves as "3D Blog" and "3D Quote from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL". The logo file is still sitting on the server at its original path, untouched.

I was at university on TTNet broadband when this shipped and I never installed it, and access had nothing to do with it: the thing was a free download that ran on any XP box with a decent graphics card. The pitch just never answered what you would do with it on the second day.

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