Copernicus project, funded in part by Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland, aims to develop a usable and effective 3D Web user interface design, where hypertext and 3D graphics are simultaneously available and linked.

Hypertext		3D Graphics
The cube (here in blue) is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object (here in green). Like a circle in two dimensions, a perfect sphere is completely symmetrical around its center, with all points on the surface laying the same distance from the center point. This distance is known as the radius of the sphere. The maximum straight distance through the sphere is known as the diameter of the sphere. A pyramid is a polyhedron formed by connecting a polygonal base and a point, called the apex. Each base edge and apex form a triangle.	+

How to design a user interface that combines hypertext and 3D graphics?

Designing such user interface presents some interesting challenges; in particular, we need to combine interactive 3D graphics know-how with well established user interface conventions of the Web. One of our designs, the Dual-Mode User Interface implemented in a wiki-type authoring environment called Copernicus, is described in the WWW2012 paper and presented in the videos below.

Dual-Mode User Interface

Copernicus - User Interface

Copernicus - Author Interface