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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know any of the science behind it, but my experience with these kinds of ideas (including the 2007 wiimote target demo which I replicated and showed to family), is that they feel exhausting to use beyond a 15 min novelty.

My guess is that the brain detects that the motions and such are not quite right, and like a wrong eyeglass prescription, your brain and eyes work overtime trying to figure out compensation.

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The thing is with the wiimote (atleast with motion plus) and the switch, nintendo really tuned in the motion. I think you can give anyone age 5-99 a wiimote (or a joycon), say play bowling or tennis, and they can pick it up within a few second

Barely anyone else puts the effort into getting gestures right. Part of that is the developers spend so long developing the gestures, they don't know whats natural and whats not anymore.

Big example is windows precision drivers. In theory they should be more natural, in practice they are terrible.

I had the same thing with compiz when it first came out. I loved it in all the videos; and the first day, but I quickly switched back to plain old desktops.

I actually did use Compiz+Beryll for a fairly long while. Admittedly, the bugs were annoying, but after switching off the most gimmicky bits or at least making them less pronounced (like Wobbly Windows, lol) I found it to be quite nice to use. It felt a bit like if you were using WindowBlinds but supercharged.

I later switched to i3wm and threw away desktop effects though. I wouldn't mind them, but I don't miss them either.

Oh wow, wobbly windows. I miss them.

https://youtu.be/nbCg9_YgKgM

For a blast from the past

I still use (KDE Plasma's) wobbly windows, but set very low. In general in GUIs I prefer a very quick animation to an instant change, perhaps because it helps make things seem more fluid and dynamic and because it guides my eyes to where a change is happening in case I'm not already looking straight at it.

Oh good times. With Firefox 2 (or maybe 1.5?) no less!

I remember spending a lot of time trying to get Compiz to work. The rain effect was my favorite, it even had windshield cleaner!

Edit: here's the rain effect - https://youtube.com/watch?v=1ZKmQS_MNAg

The sole reason I had compiz back then was to have the cube effect. I do miss my cube even in i3

I totally agree: I was a big fan of the desktop cube. I think I'm okay now, as I think I'd just about die without at least numbered workspaces, but I might be OK with getting that one back.

This is starting to happen to me with bad AI art. Subtle things that I didn’t notice for month now look glaringly out of place.

Agreed. I disabled that iOS background effect where it moves as you tilt your device. It was interesting for the first couple times, then annoying.

> is that they feel exhausting to use beyond a 15 min novelty.

Anecdote aside, would this potentially change if it was done for something with utility like data visualization? Unlike a VR headset or the original demo, you don’t need to something radically different to experience something radically different ie holding or wearing an IR light. You just start using it with your existing hardware

could a (much) bigger screen compensate for this?

I assume one of the biggest problems is, that both eyes see the exact same image while in a „real 3D environment“ both eyes would see slightly different views of the world where the brain then reconstructs the depth out of it. Here we have the „mono“ version with some „fake stereo“. It works surprisingly well, but the brain calls the bluff.

No you can achieve a very comfortable effect with a very small field of view, the difference is due to inaccuracies in positioning resulting from not having a close enough approximation of the eye's position or too low of a frame rate so the image is lagging behind motion. All of this stuff has been very actively developed by the VR community.

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