3D

Today, a guest post from nobody else but me, EER :D

The occasion? Kale showed me this digg, which is about an e-mail client named "3D Mailbox". As the name suggest, it's a three dimensional representation of your mailbox. Strangely enough by default all your e-mail is represented as women in bikini's. Nothing wrong with that obviously :P

I directly saw the potential, after all, with Mii's, PS Home and Second Life, 3D Email was only the next logical step. So hereby a small rundown of my experiences using 3D Mailbox.

First of all, the download was 72 MB(!). So that sounded promising. To use it, you need to register for some code, which I tried several times. Only after three times I found out the thing was case-sensitive and showed only uppercase while expecting lowercase input. The fact that the registration website was excruciatingly slow didn't help much to give a good first impression :X

After installing, registering and making account settings, the first thing I tried was walking around. Well. That didn't work, not using WASD, not using the arrow keys. What good is a first person interface when you can't walk around but have fixed camera positions?

The 3D action was taking place windowed, which isn't a bad idea for a mail client, however, 3D graphics in a window hardly ever perform as well as full screen. And 3D Mailbox was no exception, even when graphics are lower than low, it still doesn't perform adequate if there are multiple e-mails swimming around in the pool. There is also virtually no control over your e-mail folk, they just swim around until you can click them (if you can click them, they swim bloody fast).

There is also a regular e-mail display you can use to read your e-mail from, with spam filter and everything. But if you prefer that, you could simply use Thunderbird or Outlook Express.

All in all it has been a frustrating experience, however, I do think it has potential and I may try it again someday if they implement the following features:

• Free roaming, I want to walk around, without being in some fixed position.
• Better 3D performance, I don't want my PC to crash when there are more than 50 unread mails in the pool. In fact, I don't even want it to slow down.
• More control of my mail, I'd like something like the Sims, where I can tell my mailpeople exactly what to do
• Faster load times, booting the app took me 2 minutes, Doom 3 loads faster than that!