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What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

norbertkozsir.com

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Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#41

Post by s1mon »

jexe wrote: post #19

Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm) We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you woul…

Any workspace, real or virtual, descends into messy chaos without someone actively organizing or cleaning things up. It's bad enough by yourself, but the minute it's shared with others, it will devolve quickly. Think about any shared file system, data library, workshop, kitchen, etc...

This is why librarians, janitors, lab managers, document controllers etc. are essential to make spaces functional and organized.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#43

Post by TrackerFF »

Back in 2013 or 2014 when the first Oculus dev kit came out, the first thing a colleague of mine coded up was his own "virtual" workplace. By trade he was a graphics game dev that had been working on FPS games, but changed fields to more traditional tech work.

He made his own virtual 3D office where he could whip up new screens whenever and wherever needed, IIRC, these computers in the virtual world were virtual machines with some very bare bones Linux distros. He argued that it was a very good replacement for having to buy and mount new physical monitors.

Can't remember how long he actually used that solution, but it did look cool.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#44

Post by projektfu »

mrtesthah wrote: post #36
projektfu wrote: post #3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!

> They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Ever used a browser on iOS? Google Maps / Apple Maps? ZUIs are one of the main multi-touch user interface paradigms now.

I have used a browser on iOS, but I haven't seen a real ZUI there. Maybe one level like Mission Control. Maps is a different thing, there is just the map. There aren't a lot of things you are trying to organize in space, they have already been organized for you. You aren't going to be able to move your city closer to another, because it's more convenient. There's a difference between an object that is too big to see all at once, and a zooming UI for organization. Nor is it really revolutionary.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#45

Post by brody_hamer »

fragmede wrote: post #20
jexe wrote: post #19

Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm) We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you woul…

> It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did I think this is where AI could be put to work. Before, what would be a toilsome digital clean up process (eg git commits) is now an instruction to an LLM to clean it up. If the chaos was clean-up-able, would your product have worked?

> and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.

Part of the appeal of a canvas like this is spacial memory: that things stay where you put them. So any AI based reorganization could be a frustrating rug-pull for users that value this feature.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#46

Post by annzabelle »

s1mon wrote: post #41
jexe wrote: post #19

Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm) We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you woul…

Any workspace, real or virtual, descends into messy chaos without someone actively organizing or cleaning things up. It's bad enough by yourself, but the minute it's shared with others, it will devolve quickly. Think about any shared file system, data library, workshop, kitchen, etc... This is why librarians, janitors, lab managers, document controllers etc. are essential to make spaces functional and organized.

Right after graduation, I worked at a large company that had Data Stewards whose job it was to enforce standardized schema registration for all company datasets following the standardized field names and descriptions from the ontology explorer.

I didn't understand the purpose at the time, but then I landed at a company that had no documented schemas for any dataset and kept adding columns and it drove me mad.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#47

Post by roidster »

E-Reverance wrote: post #5

Most similar thing to it I've seen is https://youtu.be/7q-ZhdXk3w4?t=40

Not sure its comparable since this one can do terminal/ agents tiles and work on the canvas.

Seems there's more to this.

Would explore more.. Might be cool to see integrations soon

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#49

Post by jexe »

fragmede wrote: post #20
jexe wrote: post #19

Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm) We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you woul…

> It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did I think this is where AI could be put to work. Before, what would be a toilsome digital clean up process (eg git commits) is now an instruction to an LLM to clean it up. If the chaos was clean-up-able, would your product have worked?

We thought about it - but concluded that any auto-cleaning would fall under "undoing many of the benefits of the canvas." Like a housekeeper who straightens up your desk and suddenly your spatial memory is lost and you can't find the important thing you left sitting out yesterday.

Could be wrong, though! Devil is in the details with this one.

Re: What happens if you put work into the second dimension?

#50

Post by E-Reverance »

roidster wrote: post #47
E-Reverance wrote: post #5

Most similar thing to it I've seen is https://youtu.be/7q-ZhdXk3w4?t=40

Not sure its comparable since this one can do terminal/ agents tiles and work on the canvas. Seems there's more to this. Would explore more.. Might be cool to see integrations soon

Not literally the same ofc but the ergonomics and motivations are very similar
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