Work in progress · updated 8 Oct 2026 · a hypothesis, not a finding
Discarded: early ideas for the incident space
Ideas I tried for a 3D incident view, and why each one was dropped. Kept so the reasoning stays visible.
The current note is here. This page is a scrapbook, and search engines are asked to skip it.
Drag to turn it. Hover a pearl to read the step. From above, it is the table below.
| Time | Asset | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| +0:00 | A finance user opens a fake invoice. | |
| +0:04 | Laptop | A macro runs and reaches out to an unknown server. |
| +0:19 | Identity | The user's sign-in token is reused from a new device. |
| +0:27 | Laptop · alert | An alert fires on the laptop. Nobody acts on it yet. |
| +0:42 | File server | Shared finance folders are listed and copied. |
| +1:05 | Cloud storage | 1.2 GB leaves for a storage account outside the company. |
What this cannot show yet: a team looking at it together (claim B), a headset or a room, a real incident or real data, more than five assets, and whether it helps at all. That is what the test below is for.
Why it matters
Dropped work is still evidence. It shows which uses of 3D failed the test and why, so the next idea doesn't repeat them.
What I'm trying
- The first sketch: five rails, time running toward you: Kept working below. Dropped because it was a timeline you could tilt, not a place to rehearse: time in depth gets squeezed by perspective, nobody is in it, and from above it was just the table.
- A time tunnel: fly through the incident in first person: Dropped: it hides everything that isn't straight ahead, and comparing two moments gets harder, not easier.
- Blast-radius terrain: assets as land, sensitive data as high ground: Dropped: height standing for a number is the 3D bar-chart problem (perspective distorts size), and it invents a geography the data doesn't have.
- A network globe or 3D topology: Dropped: impressive and rarely useful for finding what's wrong. My own NSX study went to the grid over the map.
- The three clocks as nested rings: seconds, minutes, hours: Dropped: the home page's log-scale lanes already show this, flat and better.
- The second sketch: floors, seats and forks: The afternoon on three glass floors (agent, people, the law), each person's screen as a card at their seat, the roads not taken ghosted behind. Dropped: it was still a chart in space. Nobody was in it, there were three axes to learn before the story started, and the cards were hard to read at an angle.
- Twenty more, scored on 8 Oct: A dollhouse office, a railway signal box, an accident reconstruction, a control tower, sluice gates, an immune system, a beehive quorum, a murmuration, ant trails and eleven others, each scored twice against eight criteria. The ideas from nature scored lowest: each needed explaining before the story could start. The marble run won, and took the best parts of the dollhouse (people at their posts), the reconstruction (the evidence), the signal box (who holds each lever) and the city (the scale).
What would show it works
Nothing on this page is being tested. The test runs on the current note.
Next step
None here. The current note is "An incident you can walk through".