Exemplary Visions

One of the main goals achieved by Perspector is to enable users to quickly and easily construct layered hierarchy diagrams like the following:

This is from a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation which I managed to find a copy of today (it’s in better quality and at slide 38 here, but there is 10 Megs to download) - I remember seeing it or something similar at the 2003 PDC. This diagram was not built using Perspector; it uses only PowerPoint drawing shapes - an amazing bit of work if it was done by hand.

These kind of diagrams crop up again and again in technical papers - but they always look to have been hand crafted. Just try a Google search for “hierarchy diagram filetype:ppt”. You will find lots of examples like:

The diagram above shows how the “Premix Production Process” decomposes into 3 steps using an IDEF0 diagram, well, actually two diagrams with a hierarchical relationship. Doing 3D diagrams with a 2D tool is difficult. I remember when working with CASE tools like CADRE’s Teamwork and Aonix’s Software Through Pictures in the early 90s that the user manuals for the tools would have splendid pictures of the hierarchical relationship between diagrams, but the tools themselves would never offer an automated 3D view of the same.

In Perspector you can do these diagrams very quickly. Start with normal 2D slides for each of the layers, e.g.:

Create a new slide, insert a new Perspector image, and then insert a 2 placeholder vertical stack layout. Now just insert/link each 2D slide into the stack:

put a connector between the layers, tweak a few colors and transparencies, and you are done. If you have to change the content of any layer, the composite image will be rebuilt with the changes made to the linked slide. This is a very powerful way of working - decompose a scene into 2D parts and then assemble them in a 3D layout. You can hide the 2D slides if they are no longer needed for the presentation.

Here is our first DSI example done with Perspector:

I was able to play about with different camera angles and shift things about until I thought they looked good.

And finally, some fun locating a building using Google Earth:

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