Spatial Interfaces
johnpalmer.site>It seems that the only way to build an app that replicates the full functionality a deck of cards is to build a 3D simulation or game. Model the cards in 3D and put them on a 3D table. As long as you have controls for reaching out and picking up the cards, and moving them in space, you can do anything you can do in real life.
Unless you also want to enable castle building, no, I think a 3D interface would only add unnecessary complexity and cognitive burden. A 2D UI on desktop with keys for moving, flipping, looking at cards, and stacking, splitting, shuffling decks seems feasible.
On the other hand, if you spend time surveying the state-of-the-art in 3D input and real-time 3D physics engine, it will be clear how far away a functional deck of card simulation is. We simply don't have the tech now, and won't for the next 10 years.
3D games work because their focus is extremely limited (racing, shooting games), and/or low resolution (minecraft). As soon as you try to emulate the real world, you get things like Surgeon Simulator[1], where the awkwardness of the medium becomes fun in and of itself, albeit extremely unproductive.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/518920/Surgeon_Simulator_...
Tabletop Simulator [1] provides a pretty functional 3D interface for playing board and card games. It has easy commands for shuffling and dealing cards, to one or to multiple players, and it gives each player a hand which allows them to prevent others from peeking at their cards in an otherwise unrestricted 3D environment.
Early on in the history of TTS it was pretty clumsy but it's gotten much nicer since they added scripting facilities to let you automate game setup.
we're working on a 3d avatar-based communication platform at mozilla called Hubs (hubs.mozilla.com) that is predicated on the idea that shared spatial awareness and use of media in a shared space will be a common utility in the future, especially in VR + AR.
This is super neat! Thanks for the heads up :) there seems to be a bug where mic audio isn’t transmitted on mobile (iPhone X Safari, iOS 12.4)? Other than that works shockingly smoothly on mobile. Nice work.
Ah thanks! That's a bummer to hear. We've had to do a number of things to work around weird issues with Safari iOS's WebRTC implementation. I thought we had these issued licked -- I just tested on my device which is actually same as yours with no issues. Would you mind stepping me through a reproduction case if it's easy? Also, were you using any kind of audio peripherals on either side? Thanks for the feedback!
Holy shit! This is incredible. This was a product I've been dreaming about making, I can't believe it already exists. I wish I'd seen this before!
Awesome! Feel free to join our discord if we can help! https://discord.gg/wHmY4nd
Oi. I’m guessing the author is young and doesn’t know that much work was put into spatial UI in the 80s/90s and flopped for good reason: we might live in a 3D world, but that doesn’t mean computers should emulate that... the world doesn’t change dynamically in front of me like with a computer. Turns out that computers are hard and complicated, and simplifying their interaction works best.
That and most of these problems can be solved in other, better ways... for the actual parts that are worth answering (no one is asking who is everyone meeting with now, and tiny avatars don’t answer that any better than a simple list).
There's new ways today to interact with digital media than in the 80's and 90's, and it's a little short-sighted to say "some smart people tried it a while ago so leave it alone."
Deep learning was a cool but impractical idea in the 80's and 90's. In-browser payments were laughed out of the room when Netscape and Microsoft tried proposing them to banks and credit card firms in the 90's.
Part of what the author is saying is that, maybe with our current toolset, we can find that the "simpler" interactions are more physical and interactive now than tapping and clicking.
Sometimes people actually are asking questions like "Who has meetings right now? Which rooms can I bump people from? Did half my group go somewhere that I should be joining?" and a list in Outlook doesn't always fit the bill. Sometimes I need to know where activity is in a building, and just giving me a list of zones or spaces in the building is indeed simpler, but less contextual than, for example, seeing a map with avatars.
There's something good about making what's old new again. It does happen that things we've decided are out of reach or impractical have a novel solution waiting in current capabilities.
>There's new ways today to interact with digital media than in the 80's and 90's, and it's a little short-sighted to say "some smart people tried it a while ago so leave it alone."
It's the core idea that is bad, so the passage of time won't really change much...
We might built real-world like 3D-UIs to view with Oculus-style goggles, but 3D UIs in the 2D monitor / desktop (outside of gaming and modeling) has been proven a bad idea time and again.
I really think the Xanadu interface is a ideal way to browse information. It's not full 3d but allows simultaneous viewing of related documents and how's their relations. Not as clumsy as a million tabs buit with a tiling approach it can be decent. [1] I'm working on a version made with Markdown, GitFS and Go, but it's barely functional [2]
That being said there were some full 3d prototypes early on that were atrocious.
[1] http://tetramor.ph/wormwood/view.cgi?url=static/doc/doc.xan....
This where you are wrog and didn't read the author proposition. In the article the presented Sococo products is in 2D, and if you refers at actual usage, like slack, you stay in a 1D (list) of users, so form me (rare) products like sococo are goind in the good direction by adding 1D. 3D is perharps one too far goal, but in the mean time we should explore 2D as much as we can and radically change the ay e make web app, instead of trying to (pale) copy the (master) slack.
> I could place my personal site on a street near the websites of my friends. We could form a little village.
Wasn’t this the thought behind the addressing of pages on GeoCities?
There is NeoCities now, but it lacks the village aspect. https://neocities.org/
I hope it to be the next move in the industry, transforming text webpage into 2D RPG-like interface.
Perhaps that is why webassembly as been create for, to leap forward helping the emerge of new ( 2.5D) interface.
If not, then A13 iphone 11 will only help the mega bytes of poor dev reactjs interface sur-comsumming giga watt of power for no reason, and brutalism will then succeed ;) ;)
Yes, web-rings specifically!
Skeuomorphism can be horrible. Just give a glance at what Microsoft attempted a couple of years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5teG6ou8mWU
Why should we have to emulate real world interactions, the whole idea of computing is to make tasks easier, less of a cognitive burden, not replicate them in a virtual world. Sure there are specific kinds of software that are in need of a more humane approach but I'm not sure skeuomorphism is the answer.
I hate to be pedantic but 1995 is more than a "couple of years ago".
;) ;) ;)
The Sococo example is bang on. I used it for a contract way back and the spatial interface is extremely useful. Teams colocate virtually, dedicated meeting rooms, etc.
The problem is the software is _so bad_. Someone like Zoom needs to buy this and fix the software.
I am not zoom, but I will try to fix it ! Please tell us all your worries about it
It's just not polished.
I was going to comment about an older link that came up about skeuomorphic interfaces in Apple's apps, but I didn't want to look it up. Now, I just ran into a video with multiple layers of it within the first 23 seconds that I've watched it. So, I switched tabs back over here:
Caravan to Midnight interview on John & Yoko
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJBwsaRmNgQ
I remember now thinking about it when talking to a friend about why he doesn't like electric cars. The acceleration lacks the intensity, mostly sonically as we discussed. And I said we could skeuomorphicly add it back in.
Can a "spatial interface" make something 10x (not just incrementally) better? Are there spatial interfaces only possible in VR/AR that meet this threshold?
Thx very much!! You just puts words on my theorical researches upon making new kind of interaction in our constraint SaaS admin world (from now on Bootcamp CSS like UX is the believed limit).
From my point on view, using classical old school RPG-game type interface will be one of the possible next move ;)
I don’t think computers will be a good place for digital spatial interaction until there is a tactile element. Haptic holograms seem promising, or some kind of nano/graphene sphere ‘goo’ can provide a meaningful digital interface in meatspace.
I'm immediately reminded of BumpTop (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=BumpTop)