I spent a lot of time experimenting before I finally published the current version of my website.
I was excited about using interactive 3D worlds as a basis of information discovery. I experimented with simple scenes in Papervision3D like below, where the user can drag objects around. As you can see, the performance was really bad even with low-res images. Since that time Flash 3D engines such as Away3D have started using Stage3D to their advantage, so I imagine they would perform better than this one.
Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabledAnother idea I had was using face tracking as a navigation method. Again, this didn’t perform as well as I wanted and the file size was too large to get a nicely detailed tree. Allow Flash to access your camera to see how it works.
Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabledHere is the interface I almost used in the end, but then abandoned when I decided to retrofit the site to use my branded-wood-disc logo. I like that no actual buttons are used, but it maybe wasn’t 100% intuitive.
Sorry, either Adobe flash is not installed or you do not have it enabledThese are already a few years old now (c. 2009) and I’m still not certain that HTML5 could do face tracking or shape tweening the same way I’ve done here, and have it useable in the majority of browsers. Some day it will, but kudos to Flash to giving this to us so early on.