Script Monkey Blog – Is 3D Document Management Possible?

Instead of storing text in databases, what if we could place and group documents in a 3D environment?

15^th August 2021

My desk is littered with piles of paper and resources from various projects, usually about 5 different things at a time. It looks messy, but I know where everything is! What if we could do the same in a database?

I have always been fascinated by geometry and visual representations of structures. More and more over the past few years, I have wondered if we could store data the way our brains work: discursively.

When I think of a subject, memories related to that subject well up, whether they are emotions, smells, thoughts, ideas, or events, they are linked by the subject and each is linked in turn, to other memories.

Organising data in a similar fashion is not a common idea, but with the advent of AI, it will likely be that our approaches to digital memory will change, and we will be less reductionist in our approach.

Descartes might not be proud:

In the viewport below, a 3D equirectangular imager creates a world within which 64 papers have been rendered, each showing the same image (for now). Each represents a different PDF.

You can pan (right click), zoom (mouse wheel) and rotate (left drag mouse) using a mouse with a wheel to move around the environment.

Find a PDF on your desktop, drag it into the middle of the viewport and release the mouse button - the PDF will be sucked into my 3D world.

From this point, it is computationally trivial to upload the PDF, OCR/read it, save the text to a database and allow free text search for the users.

I'd say this proof of concept is a given!