What happens if you put work into the second dimension?
norbertkozsir.com75 points by abelsm a day ago
75 points by abelsm a day ago
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 would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.
It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface
They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!
I've often wondered if all they are missing is eye tracking and the ability auto tilling manager? I'd love to be able to press ctrl, look at three windows in my zoomed out view, and then release and have all 3 of them be distributed by a normal tiling window.
I agree that laying things out on an infinite 2d plane is surprisingly time consuming. We must be missing some affordance or something in how this should be?
this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab.
It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.
Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.
> this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago
If I recall correctly, it became popular because of the Lawnmower Man movie in '92.
Figma is a good example of this UI paradigm done well, lots of users, and financial success.
>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.
I think (work)spaces like macOS Spaces because they make access easier; with a single continuous space you have to work, whereas a workspace is a hotkey away. They make for nice demos and movie scenes though.
After having used such things since the 80s (starting with DESQview) I find myself simply minimizing or leaving secondary applications in the background of a single workspace. When I do use other spaces it is for full screen view. I don't usually need to see multiple windows at the same time, but that would be a task for a tiling manager...
Very cool interface and reminiscent of figma/excalidraw in the way they provide an infinite 2d canvas for shapes and figures. Most tools of these types tend to implement layers as well, which might be loosely analogous to multiple desktops and could be a neat interface element to explore. The impetus for layering in a drawing tool is very different from the impetus for doing such in a desktop windowing tool.
The 3d demos are similar to what you experience when using a VR headset with desktop emulation software. I ran experiments with that for several months and while the concepts were interesting, context switching in a simulated physical space was actually a lot slower than alt+tabbing between things.
I played with XR UX years back. Three quick thoughts.
I liked a hierarchy of context switching devices. Open tabs, windows, workspaces, for me are distracting clutter, scaled by some distance metric. Having to physically carry a laptop to elsewhere in a room had "I've left work for home" nicely strong context switching vibes. Followed by resumable-but-not-currently-live VMs/workspaces, etc, down to, well, gazing at a different window. So variety in costs and benefits.
I wanted a drawing-like experience for a laptop keyboard, eyes-on-screen hands-on-tablet, so kbd as touch surface (and 3D tracking above it), with the screen showing, in faint shallow-3D offset, hand position and a dynamic kbd UI. Meh. But shallow-3D UI, something 3D one can live with all day without VAC eyestrain, seemed intriguing but little explored.
With current AI, even with small 1080p laptop/HMD viewports encouraging manual packing, I'd be tempted to try escaping the whole decades-long "how do I arrange windows" mess, and tool up a personal-assistant-like "knowing what you're currently up to, here's a screens/canvases/workspaces/windows tasteful layout for that, arranged in ways you've liked".
What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions?
Answer: you get a mess.
That's why browsers weren't built like that, and also why I think this will not work.
But happy to be proven wrong of course.
> What happens if you put all your browser tabs in two dimensions?
> Answer: you get a mess.
> That's why browsers weren't built like that
But people frequently go out of their way to put their tabs into two dimensions.
There are tab trees: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabtree/afejdkkhibi...
There are tab groups: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups
There are tab containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
It seems pretty clear that people want their tabs to be organized in multiple dimensions.
FYI those Firefox containers have little to nothing to do with organizing tabs spatially, it just lets you have different 'profiles' to open tabs in that can all have separate cookies and so lets you be logged into different accounts on the same website for one example/use case.
I know that. They define an additional dimension to the tabs. Most dimensions aren't spatial.
What I like about Niri and hyprland is that I don't need to think about where windows open and about positioning them. This then looks very tiring, but I could be wrong. Would have to play with it.
Just gave it a spin and feels very rough / unpolished. - Why is the default scroll wheel action panning vertically and not zooming in and out (the main interaction)? - Why is the app size 1GB? - Everything feels clunky / not native - these are not my real apps.
This would need a lot of work to feel frictionless but I like the concept.
Nice. Reminds me of Apple's OpenDoc (which seemed promising at the time, but a bit incomplete, and then discontinued when Jobs came back to Apple).
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.
It's basically already been said but, this seems absurd. I'm not quite sure what TRUE benefit you'd get from this but it seems more frustrating than it's worth. I can't figure out a reason to do this unless I'm just in the mood to piss myself off.
Personally this is perfect! I like it for organization...
Having 20 work-trees with 20 terminals (for running the server) with 20 browser tabs open became a pain to organize; with campus I can visually lay them out and know which one is linked to which one (this was near impossible before so im sold)
I've found that working in a style similar to this is very useful for managing multiple threads of work at the same time.
I use virtual desktops, where each desktop contains a single thing that I am working on, and everything related to it. Then any good window manager can switch between them quickly and even give you a spatial sense of where you are. I organize them as a priority stack, so the topmost priority is in top position and then it goes downward from there
There's a lot that this "campus" product does that isn't present in such a set up (multi user, zooming, etc...) but virtual desktops give you a lot of the benefit and come built in to most of our operating systems
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
The title doesn't do this justice. I would so love for this to be a finished polished product that just works.
I kinda already have this with Niri's infinite-scrolling horizontal strip and Vicinae as the control plane for complex stuff. like, to replace my Niri setup I'd need a 48:9 (!) monitor
SimulaVR is interesting (VR Desktop) but I was writing code in the middle of the salt lake flats super weird
In the mid 90s and early 2000, all Linuxes had virtual Desktops.
Looks very interesting - is it open-source yet?
Widgets are back! Finally.
Sweet. Another of my projects just died. Well on life support, since this is on Mac while mine is on Linux. Though it also depends on how flexible this is.
Absolutely ABSOLUTELY love the idea and the first thought I had was Virtual Desktops! If that's a correct way to think about it then I can absolutely see myself using each tile (Desktop/Monitor to me) to contain a single thread of work.
I don't use agents at all and I think that building agent/Ai-first is gonna push away people like me (who don't want to deal with agents or any related concept or even git tbh). I'd genuinely say generalise into a Virtual Desktop typer thing.
In your blog, you mentioned that each tile is sorta like a computer (sandbox?) in itself actually containing AND running the work. That's brilliant! Now, if you could make it possible that one single tile could fill the entire screen, like a typical desktop view, on demand. Incase I just want absolute focus on one thing (I'm not always looking across all three monitors) and not be in 'Canvas mode' seeing all my Virtual Desktops.
I could also see myself working across three (or more) tiles where I've got docs in chrome, vs-code open in another and something else (more docs? Terminal? Doesn't matter). Fact is that the infinite canvas literally replaces me having to buy two - three monitors to get the same feel. I could now buy a single large curved one and have infinite monitors.
I had an inkling of this feeling when I saw Omarchy (A tile-based Linux distro from Basecamp / 37signals). What I thought was missing was infinite-ness and a little spatial something? I actually literally thought, what if those tiles didn't squish together like that and the BG were a 2D infinite canvas?
If you pull this off just right and actually focus on getting the desktop version right first (I believe that's where your users are), I believe you may have stumbled onto a different kind of operating system paradigm for a workflow issue we try to solve with even more physical monitors.
I never shut off my PC so I can imagine long lived virtual monitors wayyy off in the canvas ether with all that work still open and waiting until I'm ready for that frame of mind.
I don't have anything to say about the disappearing message except that it's cool as a way to ping or get someone's attention but a dedicated chat box? window? Just a little foldable flourish in the bottom left or right corner so yu can directly 'chat' with someone persistently who's in your space (or you're in theirs) is way more healthy for a serendipity than a disappearing message where it's kinda like an implicit race condition and loses the asynchronous nature of letting me consider a text before I reply especially in work settings. I'd also not want to give access to my entire canvas ether as opposed to selectively allowing access to specific virtual desktop lol
As for 3D? Meh I don't know. Don't need that but other people may like it. I'm just approaching this from a workflow angle. Love the whimsy regardless.
I absolutely want this, I would absolutely pay for this, I think this is a great product in the Figma range and I absolutely wish you all the best of luck because this is awesome. Just focus on the operating system /workflow angle for a desktop use-case first. I couldn't try it (don't have a Mac) but I got the idea from the video.
Good luck, guys! And ykw? I wonder if I could fork around with Omarchy and give it infinite canvas since it's already 95% there. Never mind the social feature or 3D graphics yet.
Hey, author here. Thanks for the feedback! The goal definitely is to focus on the core. I mentioned this in the video, I like to think of this as a (multiplayer) work sandbox. I'm really curious about all the different workflows people have/ could build.
Windows, Linux and even web versions are planned!
Is it odd that i was disappointed this wasn't about physics?