https://twitter.com/yoshikischmitz/status/1208625526966902784 What does the grammar of software look like? What kinds of expressions can we do in “places” that we can’t do in “apps”? How do we empower people to have the creative expression or ability to compose that they intuitively get in the physical world? Spatial Software - Essay
- spatial interfaces from John Palmer
- Something about spatial/3d spaces make it feel more alive and better than apps because of
- degrees of freedom -> methods for human creative expression that weren’t designed for
- intuitive for people to work with bc it maps to real world things
- Afforded Intuition: Our natural understanding of space makes spatial software easier to use.
- Expressiveness: In a spatial interface, more degrees of freedom mean users can interact more creatively with software and with each other.
- Presence: In many spatial interfaces, we can sense other users through the presence of an avatar or figure.
- Idea of interactions
- Preserving the higher dimensionality makes it simpler and more intuitive, not less.
- One example is an idea I call “trails.” It’s based on the story of Hansel and Gretel walking through the forest and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind them, so that they could find their way back later. What if you could do this on the web?
- A breadcrumb in this case is a single pixel that you can place in a precise location on a webpage. Placing a breadcrumb could be as simple as Option + click. While navigating the web, you could leave breadcrumbs on different pages you find interesting over the course of a browsing session. When you’re done, that sequential “trail of breadcrumbs” would be saved. You could then jump back into the trail and navigate “forward” and “backward” through the things you found interesting in that browsing session. Or share the trail with a friend, and they could step through your spatial path of navigating the web.
/
- Open questions
- are there downsides? What does a flat 2d interface give or do that a spatial interface doesn’t or does worse
- Something about the middle ground of these spatial collaborative apps (his example is figma) feels like the right in between but I can’t put my finger on why. Like the 3d game MMORPG world feels like too many degrees of freedom that it’s hard to get a flatter context..? Vs something in the middle offers the magic of degrees of freedom to users and their creative expression but also feels more manageable. Idk if it’s the ability to get some flat representation that causes that or something else
- some things that are clearly 2d/3d and map well to 2d vs 3d apps/spaces (designing 3d objects obv better in 3d)
- what about things that don’t clearly map? (human thought + collaboration)
- dependent on category
- dance is 3d need video/physical example
- abstract concepts like justice need 2d language / linear thought
- dependent on category