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Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
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Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast. Related, I remember that what blew me away upon seeing the 3DS for the first time was not the 3d playfield (which looked exactly as I expected), but the UI in 3D. It really felt like a glimpse into an exciting future.
Here's why minimalism has such staying power. Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Good graphic appeal isn't a seasoning like salt which you can just sprinkle on by paying for a few better "designed" assets. Its possible to make really pleasing design out of parts that are individually seen as cheap and low quality. Its also possible to m…
I'm going to pull a print/graphic designer card and say that "minimalism" isn't actually a style. I think I understand how it's being used in this conversation as a shorthand for "2002-2012 Google UI", which had a massive impact on the way people thought about web design. But I don't think it's fair to say that the reason for the staying power of that particular type of minimalist design is simple repetition or consistency. I think it's a combination of laziness on the part of the designers and training of the population, and it has led to a lack of curiosity on the part of users when they're confronted with more complex interfaces. I think it's important to continue to buck that trend. Every interface should feel like a jewel box full of easter eggs. But having said that, design's purpose is to download information into human brains, and so [edit: clarity] the minimal opacity of the underlying information has to be the primary design goal in all cases.
Sometimes though, "minimalism" in the Google web design sense actually makes the information much too opaque. The ideal design requirement should be specified as that which gives the user all the tools to navigate immediately. If those tools are a little complicated, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, "Why should things be easy to understand?" This is where I have a huge problem with iOS, just for example, hiding scrollbars on components that don't obviously look like they're scrollable - so users never realize that there are more options off to the right. That's minimalist, but it's less than the minimum information you need to use the software.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#94Can't help but notice that we keep wanting to make content that should be flat more 3D (e.g., animated 3D backgrounds, scroll filler on corporate pages, the entire metaverse), and content that could benefit from being 3D more flat (like UI buttons losing their pseudo-3D bevels and not looking like interactive widgets at all).
Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast. Related, I remember that what blew me away upon seeing the 3DS for the first time was not the 3d playfield (which looked exactly as I expected), but the UI in 3D. It really felt like a glimpse into an exciting future.
> Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast.
Nothing looks as dated as "futuristic" stuff.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's why minimalism has such staying power. Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Good graphic appeal isn't a seasoning like salt which you can just sprinkle on by paying for a few better "designed" assets. Its possible to make really pleasing design out of parts that are individually seen as cheap and low quality. Its also possible to m…
I don't think we'll be seeing a move away from minimalism for the foreseeable future. The style itself will continue to evolve (hey, we just got rounded corners back!), but it'll within the confine of CSS so that no graphical/svg assets will need to be created. We'll have minimalism until a browser maker decides to make background: golfstream-leather('brown') and felt-cloth('green') work in CSS.
I say this as a lover of Flash - This was exactly why when people picture "Flash websites" in their mind, they think of these fucked up textured insane things with interface bunnies strewn around a red pleather couch or something.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism doesn't become dated as fast. Related, I remember that what blew me away upon seeing the 3DS for the first time was not the 3d playfield (which looked exactly as I expected), but the UI in 3D. It really felt like a glimpse into an exciting future.
Here's why minimalism has such staying power. Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Good graphic appeal isn't a seasoning like salt which you can just sprinkle on by paying for a few better "designed" assets. Its possible to make really pleasing design out of parts that are individually seen as cheap and low quality. Its also possible to m…
> Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency.
Fundamentally, what makes design pleasing is super hard to reason about.
If it was mostly about repetition and consistency, any webpage that used bootstrap or no css at all would be pleasing. If pleasing minimalism was very easy to pull off, nobody would take note of Apple products.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#97This is super cool. I wish WebVR was still a thing and that it had gotten more love, better browser support and more libraries adept at handling head tracking, stereoscopy, etc. During that brief period where it was standard in Chrome, I happened to be bidding a bunch of interior architectural designs for a client, so I scrapped together a demo script in ThreeJS that let me stitch together prerendered stereo panorami…
WebVR is still a thing with WebXR and at least the browser devs at Meta are pushing it forward.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's why minimalism has such staying power. Fundamentally, pleasing design is about repetition and consistency. Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it. Good graphic appeal isn't a seasoning like salt which you can just sprinkle on by paying for a few better "designed" assets. Its possible to make really pleasing design out of parts that are individually seen as cheap and low quality. Its also possible to m…
Brian may love patterns and minimalism, but I am Ryan and I love chaos and maximalism.
See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software. Gimme the data. I'll learn the six different modes for each button, and fly through that shit to find what I want. Sadly, we're training people to live with less control and a shallower understanding by presenting everything in these slim little interfaces. Minimalism elides.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#99Interesting thing with the targets demo - less so with the zombie - but I notice that I only needed to shut one eye for the first few seconds to make the targets "pop out", and after that it worked for ages with both my eyes open.
Re: Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical illusion?
#100That idea has been around for years, for "virtual windows". This is from 2010.[1] The illusion only works for one person at a time, so, as a window, it's not too useful. For games, as someone pointed out, it works fine.[2] Although it hasn't gone mainstream. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqu9NuINKbc [2] https://www.trackir.com/
I replicated Jonny lees demo to see how it looks in person but soon learned the problem is one of optics. Without presenting the content at the right focal depth you don’t get past accommodation and binocular convergence conflicts. Without shutter or polarized glasses you also don’t get past binocular cues - so it looks great on a video where there is one camera view but once you add a second human eye it stops looking 3D.
I started a company to try to solve these problems without using head mounted displays and we developed 3D displays that work using an array of rectangular lenses and micro displays plus fresnel lens sheets. We adopted this approach to a new product category we called virtual skylights where we replicate the look and feel of an open sky with a distance sun above you. As you walk around a room the sun will follow you in the sky across units due to the optics and there is no need for active head tracking for this particular case. The effect is really amazing even though the content in this case is super simple. Hard to experience on a 2d screen but we have some videos of it here, in the reaction video you can see how people react to seeing it the first time.