This illustrates a problem with many "modern" applications. My first impression: "Oh, that looks nice. Looks like in real life". Then I tried using it and found that it is clunky and slow to the point it is barely usable and I would much faster build the real circuit on a real breadboard instead.
Exactly. I was seeing a friend the other day who was using an ancient version of mastercam, version 8 I think. I looked at it and thought wow I need to update him to a later version. However after watching him use it it just all made sense. There were a few areas that could be improved, but it was so simple and clear to use.
I'd like to see a study done of this kind of application, but removing all slowness. Perhaps you could run it on a $10k gaming rig, or pre-render all interactions or something to make all reactions instant.
That should inform us of the real value of a lifelike 3D UI, separately from the effects of the jankiness that normally accompany them.
This specific circuit simulator does have some performance-related jank, but even if you ignore it, you can easily see where it breaks down, for example:
* If you look at the black/red wires going to the Arduino, they kind of overlap
* If you swap the black/red wires (so that one of them has a shorter distance to cover), you get visual artifacts
* It is trivial to make a wire unconnected while moving it to another hole (and instead just touching the plastic parts of the breadboard)
* Making even the most trivial modifications (eg. putting 5V directly through the diode) requires a lot of dragging, rotating, panning, and zooming to get it done (but hey, at least there’s smoke if you actually do that)
* There are many things that can go wrong, because the developers didn’t think about it; for example, the bottom power rails of the breadboard don’t actually work
* Making a modification to a running circuit is impossible, and switching between design and simulation modes takes time and does not always remember the camera position
All of those aren’t a problem in a 2D simulator. Some of them because the 2D simulator abstracts some things away better (eg. power sources or wires), some of them because the developers could invest more effort in the simulation logic, and some of them because the 3D simulator does a bad job at the real-life parts of it (eg. overlapping wires or putting the connector inside the hole).
