These are excerpts from an article in Infoworld magazine, March 17, '97 issue.

Xerox may have failed to capitalize on the revolutionary graphical user interface developed by its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), but the company is now pioneering a set of 3-D interfaces designed to help users see complex information in more imaginative ways.

InXight, a Xerox company formed in December 1996 to commercialize PARC's innovations, is delivering interface components called VizControls that display large numbers of data objects -- the results of a Web search for instance -- in 3-D formats that help users see the importance of objects' relationships.

"The problem that we are trying to address is information overload," said Ramana Rao, who is the chief technology officer at InXight. One VixControl, a Hyperbolic Tree, is a navigational aid that displays file structures in the form of a spherical tree. As users rotate the sphere, the perspective on the links changes. "That kind of visual environment makes finding information in a directory tree much easier to do," said John Robb, an analyst at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass.

Another control is the Perspective Wall, a 3-D image of a wall that helps users see relationships between documents measured across time and some other property. For instance, doctors could view patient records to spot disease clusters in geographical regions.

VizControls are being integrated into Web-search engines such as InfoSeek and into decision-support applications such as data-warehousing software from ComSahre.

Controls available later this year will include Web Forager, which displays documents using a metaphor based on books and rooms; Table Lens, which can be used to view large spreadsheets for statistical spikes or anomalies; and Documental Lens, which lets users track of the main one they are working on.

"We're are trying to take advantage of humans' ability to process information in a variety of ways," said Mohan Trikka, InXight's president.