Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

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).

View on HN

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....

[2] https://github.com/germ/xanadown

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com