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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

How is this wrong?

Our visual system is optimized, rather extremely, for understanding 3d scenes under the simple perspective model that our eyes are based on: x' = (x * f) / z

Outside of that 99.999% experience norm, that are brains are so used to, is disconnect and discomfort. If you've ever put on a new pair of glasses, with a different prescription, you'll understand exactly what he's talking about: depth offset and dizziness.

The disconnect is why refraction and lensing is interesting to look at: the model your eyes are used to seeing, for the world behind the thing, is not normal.

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I wonder if this is linked to the reason that so many people become nauseous with 3D glasses.

When we see 3d movements that don't correlate with what our inner ears, the response is that our body assumes something is wrong, we have ingested a toxin, and a nausea / vomit response is created.

There is something visually jarring about this Liquid Glass UI, and it's possible it's related to movements not correlating with an internal frame of reference.

I get car sick quite easily, same with VR, but I actually like the design language of Liquid Glass over the first iteration of Material (I like the new updates to Material too). I think people should watch from minute 13 onward if they're short on time and want the gist of it.

I guess I'm a weird outlier and that's fine.

I can't use 3d glasses because my eyes don't converge properly. Maybe one day I'll have surgery to correct that

the fact that it's surprising does not make it a visual cue. A cue to what? I am not aware of any psychophysics study that says we have perception of droplets or lens transformations (in contrast to shadows , gradients etc that are well studied). There also doesn't seem to be an evolutionary reason for it because the natural world does not have lenses and glass. And UIs are usually based on intuitive features.

Not saying this makes the ui good but it should go without saying that the natural world has water which acts as a lens.

Also, of course we have perception of droplets. What we don’t have is an intuitive understanding of how light interacts with droplets.

I suspect that Apple are trying to leverage this lack of intuition to make their ui interesting to look at in an evergreen way. New backgrounds mean new interesting interactions. I’m not confident that they’ve succeeded or that that’s actually a good goal to have though. I have it on my iPhone 13 and personally I find it annoying to parse, and I feel relief when I go back to traditional apps untouched by the update like Google Maps

droplets of water are not lenses without a glass behind it, and we couldn't see substantial effects behind them before we had glass windows. There was little evolutionary reason to develop any perception of refraction in droplets of water. in contrast, shadows are instant indicators of distance and gradients instantly distinguish concave from convex surfaces for light coming from above.

(water doesnt do lensing unless it s a droplet)

I get that your point is that we don’t have a strong intuition for lenses and that’s tied to a lack of evolutionary reason to have them. I agree and suspect that might be the point of why Apple are using a the lens effects. We don’t need to go so far as to say the natural world is completely devoid of such phenomena. Of course they’re there but they’re largely not relevant to survival throughout human history

Is there any study saying that user interfaces should use visual effects for which our brains have hardware acceleration? It seems a reasonable premise, but is there data?

Taking advantage of innate perceptual cues is smart and our interfaces have always taken advantages of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception

we shouldn't need a manual to interpret a UI

I don’t entirely disagree, but that is still an intuition, not a proof that our interfaces should always work that way.

We used to ride animals with legs, which worked a lot like our legs do. Does that mean the wheel is wrong? We don’t have wheels, and they don’t occur in nature.

I don’t think Apple has invented the wheel, and I’m inclined to agree that leveraging our hardware acceleration makes sense. But I haven’t seen anything beyond blind assertion that of course it has to work that way.

I think things are more "differential" than that. Since many of us look at these interfaces more than any other visual stimulus, our perception will be optimized around them. The ideal system, in the short term, will involve familiarity more than anything.

I assume he's saying the "disconnect" is easy to see.

If our brain understands one thing, it's that glass is a wall between our body and what we see. You can't touch that, or you'll hurt yourself.

That's... an odd thing for your brain to believe about glass.

That --in case it wasn't clear, and I can see why it wouldn't be-- refers to the thing you're looking at, through glass.

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