Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Infinite canvas notes in the non-Euclidean Poincaré disk

uonr.github.io

188 pointsuonr33 comments

Hi!

This is an infinite canvas note-taking tool where notes are laid out in a non-Euclidean, hyperbolic geometric space. As you drag and navigate through the view, you’ll experience a unique fluid distortion that naturally leverages your brain's spatial memory.

I’ve been obsessed with the concept of space in HCI for years. Many modern UI patterns are essentially workarounds for the lack of screen real estate. While researching zoom-based UIs a while back, I stumbled upon old HCI papers that used the Poincaré disk model of the hyperbolic plane to organize data. It elegantly projects an infinite space into a finite disk, keeping everything contextually visible.

I wanted to build an experimental app around this concept years ago, but the non-Euclidean math was a significant roadblock. Recently, I decided to give it a shot with the help of LLMs. It turns out that LLMs can handle the mathematical heavy lifting quite well, specifically in designing the coordinate systems and optimization algorithms, provided that you guide them with a solid architectural design.

This is still an experimental demo, but I hope it leaves an impression. I’d love to know if you find this paradigm practical for organizing your thoughts.

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Very interesting user interface concept, and smooth implementation. It's weirdly intuitive, like navigating on the surface of a sphere, or zooming in/out of a kind of spherical perspective where things that are further away are smaller in size. I had difficulty at first reaching some small clustered points, until I got the hang of it.

An idea that came to mind is that maybe some shading would help, with closer areas brighter and more distant areas darker. Or, like another comment said, an option to show/hide a grid.

This is very cool. It maps to my existing understanding of how knowledge actually works.

You often don't need to see the whole hyperbolic disc, only some region in the center, and there, the text would largely still be readable.

The arrows are drawn in hyperbolic space, but the text is not; it really should be. Then there will never be an overlap problem.

Alternatively, the center of the text (or generally the anchor) of the text box could still be oriented to the screen to seed the render orientation, just like it already is, but allow the rest to be drawn following the rules of geodesics in the hyperbolic space. though I don't know if that would work as well.

Pretty cool, I actually explored the same idea several months ago, as you can put a huge amount of information while keeping emphasis on local features

https://paperverse.net/

I see you also hade a similar idea on what happens when you click on an arrow

I'm a bit more interested in what it teaches about the hyperbolic plane than I am in it's effectiveness as a note taking app (although the way it supports an exponentially growing tree does seem appropriate for depicting knowledge - I'd be interested to see something like a force directed graph of Wikipedia plotted on the hyperbolic plane).

The points and arrows do move and change shape appropriately while panning, but the images and text do not. It might be possible to use feDisplacementMap (an SVG filter effect) cleverly to get the deformations right. This would probably make performance worse, and I'm not sure how readable the text would be, but it would mean that things wouldn't start overlapping each other while panning.

This would be fantastic on a tablet; stylus for entry and fingers for navigation would make it very efficient and a great improvement over the standard infinite page. I would probably pay for a non-web tablet version, it is rare my tablet is connected to the internet.

(I'm the dev) I tried it out on an iPad and it seems to work fine. Let me know if you run into any issues. Supporting direct stylus/Pencil input will definitely be a challenge, but I think it’s worth a shot.

It worked on my Android tablet but I can't scribble a note and draw a picture/diagram with the stylus. I don't know anything about iPads but on Android you have the USI pen and for any app that understands the USI pen, it interprets fingers and stylus individually, the stylus is active so the tablet knows when it is input from the stylus or input from a finger. The google Cursive app which is the standard Android note app shows this well, stylus only writes and fingers only pan/scroll/zoom unless you switch it into finger mode so you can write with a finger.

If you managed to give all the features of Googles Cursive app within your Poincaré disk paradigm, I would happily drop $100 on it, assuming it worked as an offline app.

Edit: should mention that I don't think this is worth $100, other than to the handful of people like me who it would be perfect for assuming it was well executed. You would probably make more charging far less. The paradigm could translate amazingly well to the tablet/stylus experience if the details are worked out well.

I really like the approach but it'd certainly be nice to be able to use alternate topologies.

Also it'd be nice if there was an underlying grid plotting the metric/distance function to help conceptualize distance/relationships better when you get to the edges.

If you look closely, you'll see that some faint dots are already outlining an order 7 triangular tiling.

This is neat. I built an LLM once that stored its embeddings in poincare space, and it was a struggle for me to visualise what it was doing at first. This would have helped.

While developing poincake, I actually thought about building a language learning app using a similar approach. The idea was to map word embeddings onto a Poincaré disk so users could explore word relationships and clusters.

I really like this, but moving around a bit I find that things kind of seem to rotate which is disorienting. When this loads, the photo is to the right of the cake. After zipping around a bit in this space, the photo is then to the left of the cake. Is that a rotation? Is there a way to lock the orientation?

Ah, just found the node that says that "there is no up/down/left/right".

I do not understand this space.

You might as well look at HyperRogue, where the whole game happens to be on the same model.

I think it says inspired by HyperRogue

I like it. The one thing I'd absolutely add is a color difference between the background and the circle, or at least something to indicate the horizon which would provide a better sense of orientation.

I find such maps overwhelming and a detriment to how I learn things. I suppose I'm not exactly neurotypical, then?

That's insanely cool. Now how about actually compress text with LLM that summarize long texts with the non-Euclidean visulization...

This is ideal for large argument maps, thank you!

This is pretty cool. I'm curious, what do you mean "leverages your brain's spatial memory"?

Yeah, I don't know about the author, but my brain spatial memory is very much tied to Euclidean geometry. The holonomy effect (view is rotated when coming back to the same point) in particular is very disorienting.

It's cool, but I would never use this for real.

I think it means you remember things by where they are relative to each other.

But yeah, the rotation effect makes it a bit confusing compared to normal space.

It's Greg Egan's notebook!

Greg Egan uses 5D for his notes.

I love it -- would like to use this daily.

And this is how vibe coding should be

I love how wild this is. Thank you for thinking out of the box.

I kind of hate actually using this tho since it's just not how my brain thinks about concept relationships (spatially related concepts even in linear space).

Now can you do the inverse and let us see it from the inside?

Loving the smoothness of this. One concerning thing is overlapping notes – I don't want to be fucking around with trying to move the canvas just right to read a note under another note and there doesn't seem to be any other simple mechanism to resolve this (especially for larger blocks/images). The 'untangle' feature doesn't really solve this.

i think there isnt an overlap if you zoom in more?

just another user. fun app, feel like theres something here. as with all note taking apps pen and paper for me are just so hard to beat.

I'm thinking LOD might help mitigate the overlap issue, perhaps by having an LLM progressively shorten the text until it's a single Unicode character.

Also, as other comments suggested, shading or similar techniques could help.

That said, I doubt this can be fully resolved unless the text is rendered in hyperbolic space, as another commenter mentioned. I'll need to experiment and see if that's doable.

Nice concept. really unique experience. so smooth.

This is batshit, I love it

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