Can'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.
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 make tacky tripe out of great quality parts. The important thing is consistency and arrangement. A pleasing design is one that lends itself to file compression.
Minimalism is a very easy style to pull off because the fewer elements there are the easier it is to make them all consistent, uniform, simple. It takes the least time to get it right. It can be handed off to someone else without explaining any "vision" or guidelines.
None of this is to say it is bad. Minimalism is good actually. Just that minimalism isn't uniquely good. Other designs can be timeless, they just rarely are.
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.
A recent trend seems to be to combine minimalism, tackyness and deliberate inconsistencies in order to feel more playful and friendly. IMO these designs are also clear, because they allow themselves to let things pop out and have very strong accents and contrast.
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.
> See, me personally, this is what I want in my medical device software.
Minimalism is a major factor for cognitive accessibility. If you build for the lowest common denominator then of course qualities like control must necessarily take a dive. If Google gave you more controls for search then it'd be better search, but then it wouldn't be as minimal anymore.
On software you have lots of room to hide complexity for the pro user, but that's not the case for hardware.
Hah. There's truth to that, but just on a tangent, it got me thinking about the hardware of my youth versus the hardware of today. Like, when I was 8, the coolest thing to me was calculator watches. They had either 3 or 4 rows of rubber buttons, or the fancy ones had flat buttons. They weren't trying to hide their interface under a flat screen, right? They were going out of their way to give you lots of stuff to play with. They had different modes; you could cycle through stopwatches and alarms and little 1-line memos and addresses. They encouraged you to read the owner's manual that came with them.
Those systems taught people how to use them, and didn't necessarily sacrifice everything to a series of wizard screens. I think somewhere around the point where design decisions started being made to help onboard people into a piece of software or hardware faster, we lost the joy of digging deep in the user manual and finding cool shit.
That Casio calculator watch is still sold—I saw one in Walmart yesterday. I was also admiring a digital Timex Ironman watch that had an "OCCASNS" function, including customizable calendar and time-of-day alerts, which I had never seen before on those watches. It only took me a minute or two to figure out how it worked, even with a segmented LCD and odd contractions to fit the words on the screen.
(I settled on a classic analogue Timex with a leather strap. Can't beat them, really.)
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.
Saying that designers are lazy and its their fault is a weak argument. For sure not all of them are lazy. Most of the time they are told what to produce.
What you are talking about is economics. Its possible to deliver good results faster/cheaper and the result is more timeless. Also clean interfaces are putting function and content in front. Thats why companies choose this.
So dont blame the designer but the boss/manager. Its like saying that app is slow because devs are lazy.
I'm sympathetic to working in big corporate structures as a designer where diktats you disagree with come down from on high. So I'm not blaming individual designers here. But I do blame art departments for not fighting back against non-artistic managerial marketing decisions, and some of that blame rests on art directors for capitulating, and some of it rests on designers for not making their opinions heard to the art directors. From a corporate standpoint, listening to your marketing team instead of your design department - and instead of having an open door to designers to walk in with ideas - is extremely limiting. It's not making the most of your resources. But design departments get a certain kind of laziness in their culture once it's the case that no one upstairs is going to listen, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think we agree on a lot of things which aren't vocabulary. Well, that and jewel box full of Easter eggs. I have no idea wth you mean or why non designers would care. But you've touched upon one of my biggest gripes, the difference between simplification and reduction. A simplification organizes information into useful patterns so that it can hide away redundancy. A reduction cuts information for the sake of presentation. Reduction can feel like simplification because the end result is a nice crisp aesthetic, but the difference is apparent when you try to use it. Its like the difference between tidying your room and throwing all your stuff out.
Designers tend to love the Vignelli map, but everyone in the city hated it and it was short lived. To this day you can still hear condescending remarks like the Vignelli map was "to abstract for NY". "NY choose the worse map". But its exactly like you said, first and foremost the point of design is to download information into brains, and by that metric the current map is far superior which is why it won.
Consider the background geography. Ardent supporters of the London Tube / Vignelli style insist surface streets are clutter full stop. Maybe that reduction of information makes sense in London and Europe where streets are a mess anyway, but in a grid city that reduction doesn't make sense. The present map simplifies the streets down to just a few representative examples so you know the local orientation of the grid and have a few reference points. Simplification, not reduction. The information is still there.
The coloring system is another massive example of simplification. The Vignelli map seems to hate information compression, insisting every line have its own color and own dots. The current map reduced clutter by organizing lines by where they run in Manhattan, denoting the express/local difference with black/white dots. Personally I think that symbol could be less arbitrary, but most people have no trouble figuring it out quickly. Its a simplification down to a single line which makes everything fit in a tight space while being easy to follow. There have been changes in service patterns which have ruined parts of the current map, but the very original version had some nice symmetry to it (and mostly still does). Even though the rule is technically "color by Avenue in Manhattan", that rule lined up with certain repeating "color zones", eg both South Bronx and Flatbush being Green/Red, Upper West side and New Lots being Blue/Red etc. You could sort of count on certain colors to be associated with certain broadly defined endpoints.
Perhaps, this example, being so utterly detached from the modern web design world, is one you might use simply because no one has any personal stake in it. Its a lesson designers should learn more often. Hiding and removing != simplifying. Good != pretty. Organize information well and its often close to pretty on its own.
(I have plenty of gripes with the present map but that's for another time)
> Designers tend to love the Vignelli map, but everyone in the city hated it
Those designers were/are more illustrators than designers [1]. Design is, or at least should be, as much about the function of an object as about it's looks. A design that hinders functionality isn't a good design.
[1] I call the modern breed of such designers "Dribbble-driven"
Just want to say, I loved clicking on that mta.info link and seeing the SVG load in gradually, first the coarse map elements, then the coloured subway lines, then finer and finer details and labels. Felt like some kind of crescendo of dataviz, as if the THX sound effect ought to play over it. 10/10.
What gets me is the death of decorations, and then trying to guess what interaction you're going to get if you click on a certain flat color bit of a background window.
I keep thinking back to the winxp to 7 era (along with the various windowblinds/uxstyle third party skins), plus various furniture, fittings or tools/utensils/appliances from decades/centuries past (so antiques essentially). The physical items would have textures from the materials used and the processes to make them, maybe they'd be gnurled to add a grip, but also elaborations that aren't purely functional or just to make it look nicer. When you're familiar with those visuals they do seem to help you know what part of it you're looking at, and how it's going to act if you grab/click any given point.
Scrollbars are now an annoyance (when they're not hidden) as they're often low contrast and made to fade into the background, just another dull rectangle in a sea of others, rather than a distinct bit of UI chrome. There used to be a unique inline and small grooves at the centre point as I remember.
I'm not about to declare having the pendulum swing to the other extreme would be better, but it'd be interesting to see it explored again.
> 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.
Apple is basically Bauhaus for nerd stuff - and that is no small thing. Perhaps if the microcomputer had been first commercialised in Europe they'd all look like that anyway.
Cue Kevin McCloud from Grand Design whose standard rant about minimalism is that it’s actually the hardest to pull off because you aren’t hiding behind anything. All of your decisions are exposed, so you have to be even more thoughtful about attaining cohesion in the final form. Of course, he is talking about buildings which is a different thing, but I think some of what he says applies to other design fields too, including UI design.
Minimal "flat" UIs are possible for normal people to implement. In the 2000s I had no idea how I was supposed to make a button that looks like it's made of drop shadows and fine Corinthian leather for a project in my free time.
(For that matter I don't know how I'd get it done for a professional project either.)
I was right there with you. I was very supportive of the improving app UI standards at the time but it started to feel like a contest of whose design has more visual complexity and nuance vs the real usability.
Windows Phone in particular was a huge breath of fresh air for me (rip) and Material Design a welcome evolution that I still feel strikes a decent balance.
The 3DS didn’t do anything for me and a large part of the population. The same goes for the 3D glasses that went out of style years ago. The main thing it did was give me and others a headache. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have been a fad.
Other than this demo, the only 3D effects that actually work (ie 3D movies) are in VR
The stability of the 3D feature was greatly improved on the New Nintendo 3DS, which added eye-tracking using the front-facing camera so that you could tilt and turn it and you wouldn't see a double image. I've never personally heard of anyone ever getting a headache from it, and it would be a bit silly not to use it because it doubles the screen resolution and makes everything much sharper.
Exactly, it violates The Toilet Principle, which states that most of the time, the user of your app wants to do the thing they came to do, then get on with their life.
Because it's a tough sell to put a camera right in front of people's TV. IIRC, the only product managed to do this is Portal TV from Facebook...
I actually tried something like this and talked to lots of potential users about this (during 2020 pandemic). But the willingness to pay for the camera is quite low.
I remember when the Xbox 360 was announced and the core idea is that you plugged all your media crap into it. Combined with Kinect, it screamed, “we just want to know what you’re doing.”
The article describes an important issue. For the effect to look right, you have to close one eye. I suppose if you had a stereoscopic display this would not be an issue
I don’t know any of the science behind it, but my experience with these kinds of ideas (including the 2007 wiimote target demo which I replicated and showed to family), is that they feel exhausting to use beyond a 15 min novelty.
My guess is that the brain detects that the motions and such are not quite right, and like a wrong eyeglass prescription, your brain and eyes work overtime trying to figure out compensation.
I had the same thing with compiz when it first came out. I loved it in all the videos; and the first day, but I quickly switched back to plain old desktops.
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 either.
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.
I totally agree: I was a big fan of the desktop cube. I think I'm okay now, as I think I'd just about die without at least numbered workspaces, but I might be OK with getting that one back.
I assume one of the biggest problems is, that both eyes see the exact same image while in a „real 3D environment“ both eyes would see slightly different views of the world where the brain then reconstructs the depth out of it. Here we have the „mono“ version with some „fake stereo“. It works surprisingly well, but the brain calls the bluff.
No you can achieve a very comfortable effect with a very small field of view, the difference is due to inaccuracies in positioning resulting from not having a close enough approximation of the eye's position or too low of a frame rate so the image is lagging behind motion. All of this stuff has been very actively developed by the VR community.
The thing is with the wiimote (atleast with motion plus) and the switch, nintendo really tuned in the motion. I think you can give anyone age 5-99 a wiimote (or a joycon), say play bowling or tennis, and they can pick it up within a few second
Barely anyone else puts the effort into getting gestures right. Part of that is the developers spend so long developing the gestures, they don't know whats natural and whats not anymore.
Big example is windows precision drivers. In theory they should be more natural, in practice they are terrible.
> is that they feel exhausting to use beyond a 15 min novelty.
Anecdote aside, would this potentially change if it was done for something with utility like data visualization? Unlike a VR headset or the original demo, you don’t need to something radically different to experience something radically different ie holding or wearing an IR light. You just start using it with your existing hardware
The New Nintendo 3DS was based around this, and although they abandoned it I think there's still a lot of room for something like it. It's more AR than AR is.
It always seemed gimmicky to me, but I’ve heard that the Mario brothers 3D worked a lot better with the depth element than in any of the remakes (I did it enjoy it just fine on my switch)
No, it relied on the fact that the player would ~always be looking straight at the screen at a relatively fixed distance. There was a slider you could use to set the strength of the depth effect, all the way to disabling it completely.
It was fun and worked pretty well, but it was very much a gimmick.
EDIT: Just saw the other comment, I didn't know the New 3DS had actual eye tracking. Neat!
I bought a new 3ds and it was absolute bliss. The mario bros 3d game was incredibly intuitive to play, that 3ds has spoiled any 3d platformer for me. I tried playing the new 3d game on the switch and even though it has shadows, I kept missing platforms etc.
I think the original 3ds's lack of tracking is what turned it off for most people, though.
nobody cared because you had to buy new hardware (the fire phone) to get it, at the expense of the current hardware you already really liked. In this case, you don’t have to get any new hardware.
It works fine but the image will only appear 3D to the person wearing the sensor because the effect is entirely based on responding to the wearer's head movement.
> That video is from 2007, and yet the technology being shown is so impressive that it feels like it could have been made yesterday.
Really? Who thinks this in 2023? I thought it was a fun little demo back then, but that was it. Both then and now I just want AR as the default for everything and for screens to die already. We've had the tech for it since then too, but not enough demand from general consumers.
It would take some serious overlay resolution to replace a monitor, which just doesn't exist right now (?). If the angular size of a pixel is too large, it's essentially like being nearsighted. A person with 20/20 vision can see detail down to the eye forming an angle of 5 arc minute (1 arc minute = 1/60 of a degree).
TrackIR is existing and mature product using the original idea.
Sure it requires extra hardware, but it's amazing in first person games that support it. You get to use your good monitor, don't get dizzy like in VR and it could be quite cheap.
I think implementing similar thing with just camera and computer vision is a good idea, let's make this more common thing.
Open track with neural net tracker can do what you're asking. The default configuration is a bit wonky but it works very well after some smoothing here and there.
Benefit of trackir is computation being done partially in the device/camera (as opposed to diy clips, which I use for my flight sims).
There have recently been some cameras released that don’t require ir-clips and offload the computer some, but feels =\ having a webcam requiring constant camera and/or tracking.
Is it though? My understanding was that TrackIR was nothing more than an IR webcam surrounded by IR LEDs, that also served as a dongle for the freely downloadable "driver" which contained all the tracking code. With OpenTrack, a webcam with the IR filter removed, and a 3d-printed clip, I get results indistinguishable from TrackIR.
A system that uses a visual light camera and no reflector clip will inevitably be slower, as it is a much harder computer vision task. But I don't think hardware acceleration comes into it anywhere.
Now we can all look forward to the day when websites refuse to load because they want camera permissions for fake depth, shiny buttons, and other random visual effects.
Also they'll analyze your face and send it to the ad tracking agency.
If you're curious what an implementation looks like: Charlie Gerard's article[1] shows how to accomplish a similar effect in-browser. It's pretty straight forward although not sure what performance looks like in large scenes.
I like the idea, but don't know if people are ready to grant webcam permissions to untrusted any websites.
One of the cooler takes of Bitcoin or "crypto" is that you can use native tokens to pay for visiting websites. A browser plugin combined with a lightning wallet for instance could enable a website to request a payment of any amount of Satoshis to view the site, or it will redirect you to a 402 error page. This generates a way of monetizing content without the need for ads or tracking.
I'm not sure something that actively incentivises writers blather on endlessly, bury the lede, split their content over dozens of pages, slightly raising the price knowing that people will become densensitised to reading your per page costs, lock final review scores behind more expensive paywalls than the lower priced intro pages, and who knows what other dark patterns will be invented all while forcing me to make a determination every fifteen seconds on "is this worth the price they just asked?" is supposed to be a cool thing.
If you thought recipe articles were terrible today, just wait until you have to pay 0.01 for their life story and then 0.03 for the ingredients only to discover that it will cost you another 0.15 for the actual instructions.
Crypto in general yes, but the lightning network specifically no. It's utterly impractical for most users, unless you use a third party hosted wallet, in which case almost all the benefits of crypto, like anti-lock-in and jurisdiction-agnoticism, go away.
Crypto-powered micropayments could potentially massively boost revenue for content creators, including socially valuable platforms such as news sites.
Yes, it'll be used for workplace monitoring to generate easy to measure and rank KPIs for review time.
Research indicates the ideal reading speed for corporate PR emails is 40 wpm and your teamwork KPI at review time will be stack ranked based on how close you move your eyes to the ideal 40 wpm reading rate.
I mean, that's true today. I'm sure you've seen plenty of shops egregiously misrepresenting the sizes of products via forced perspective or outright editing in images. If they were to upload a 3D model it would only get more difficult to mislead about the physical characteristics of the product.
> Look directly at the captcha, please read in a clear voice while drinking verification can.
> Whoops, looks like you may have blinked or looked away! Please try again. If you have run out of verification cans, you can say "I love Cosco" to temporarily credit your account with one VCT while we dispatch a new box to your address.
I think it's important to remember that Shopify doesn't have a singular ad product. It's a platform to build a web store on, and merchants can add whatever they want to their shop, but Shopify doesn't collect any data across shops.
That's the shop's data, not Shopify's.
Bias: my team at Shopify helps merchants launch their shop and get their initial sales.
Does Shopify have a sales team? Does Shopify have a marketing team?
What's a more likely and more powerful pitch that the marketing team could use to better increase sales of the Shopify platform given this tool they've developed:
1. You can make your stores more FUN! With this little funny tool.
2. You can have more accurate tracking data on what your user is looking at at every moment when they're browsing your website's catalog.
Why not both, really? It's not in Shopify's interest to keep eye-tracking data, but it is in their interest to encourage people to use this feature because we all know this kind of data is a selling point for an e-commerce business.
You really sound like the gun manufacturer that, after a mass shooting, says it's not the people that are flooding the market with guns that are the problem but the individual that did the shooting. This discourse might resonate with some, but not me I guess.
I think it's disingenuous to compare an online store platform to a gun manufacturer.
What I'm saying is that individual stores can track their customers however they like, but that there isn't an overall tracking system across all stores.
Shopify's selling feature is that your data is your own. Your customer data is your own and not used by Shopify. That's the competitive advantage over Amazon, who will look at your sales data and use it to compete against you.
It would be penny-wise but pound-foolish to do what you suggest.
I don't think it's disingenuous? Gun manufacturers develop guns that gun stores buy to sell to people, Shopify develops tools to track people that they sell to business owners. The gun can be be bought by an individual that can do good or bad. Same for Shopify.
Shopify is developing tools that can be used to do harm or to do good. But when they develop tools they know will be used for surveillance, then they can't just wash their hands away. There is responsibility there. Shopify knows how people are using the tools they are creating.
I think facilitating independent shops is positive, but developing more and more tracking functionality to get these shops to be "data driven" is harmful to society. Although that seems to be "the market pull", a lot of times the most ethical choice is not necessarily the most profitable one. Shopify wants to compete with Amazon and they believe a good way of doing that is offering their customers (business owners) better ways to track their customers (shoppers).
All you're doing is giving a third party the gun and your justification seems to be "well if we don't do it, they'll get their guns from amazon anyway". Who owns the data matters, I agree, and I commend Shopify for that, but it's a problematic trend that is being facilitated by these tools anyway. I mean, we should get rid of the guns, not go "we need more good guys with guns". That's my opinion at least.
Less is more. We don't need 3D except in a few cases. Computer output is about information, not trying to make things look like in real life 3D. When we read a book we just need some black-and-white text.
There are great applications for virtual reality for instance in medicine. But in general 3D is only needed when it is needed. If it is not needed then pushing it onto users becomes a distraction.
I agree. Gaming is an obvious use case, as the article mentions. Head tracking is a great and simple way to increase immersion, without requiring VR and bulky headsets.
I'm surprised more games haven't experimented with this. On PC, a barrier might be knowing the camera parameters and screen dimensions, but those can be easily calibrated, as the article shows.
On consoles, however, we've had cameras for two generations now, and the technology has been mostly underutilized for gimmicky features. The only game I know that did something really interesting is Alien: Isolation on PS4. With the PS Camera, it could do head tracking and noise detection, for some very cool interactions.
The microphone is also severely underutilized. There are many neat applications, especially today with AI voice recognition.
I actually implemented this at the time because it looked so cool. Unfortunately it doesn't work nearly so well in real life as it does on a video.
I don't exactly recall why but I think it's just that there are so many cues that you're looking at a screen that your brain won't accept that it's really a 3D scene.
It's a bit like those painted or chalked perspective illusions. They look great in a photo or video. Not so much in real life.
(I don't think it's because of stereoscopy because I am stereoblind.)
But, really, the answer to that question is "no". The illusion simply doesn't work if you have two eyes and depth perception. That's why the 3DS needs to have a stereoscopic screen on top of eye tracking, or why VR headsets have 2 screens.
It’s curious that this post came a group in Shopify called the “Spatial Commerce Team”. I’ve often wondered why online shopping hasn’t evolved beyond galleries of thumbnail images. Today’s graphics should be able to simulate the immersive experience of browsing through a physical store—walking past shelves and riffling through merchandise.
I think you have it backwards. Shopping evolved from the practical limitations of physical shelves, to the more convenient non-physical, searchable, browsable online store categories. There is no demand for "virtual shelves" among shoppers.
I have a somewhat related question/thought regarding daily desktop use: is it possible to have the sound from the speakers follow the browser or window that's playing it? For example, having a podcast playing on the top right corner while a different website on another browser tab also plays sound, but with the sound source corresponding to its location, making it easier to distinguish between the two. It would also be really helpful when you have a ton of browser tabs open be able to find it with a more physical metaphor.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadI would puke
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.
Minimalism is a very easy style to pull off because the fewer elements there are the easier it is to make them all consistent, uniform, simple. It takes the least time to get it right. It can be handed off to someone else without explaining any "vision" or guidelines.
None of this is to say it is bad. Minimalism is good actually. Just that minimalism isn't uniquely good. Other designs can be timeless, they just rarely are.
We'll have minimalism until a browser maker decides to make background: golfstream-leather('brown') and felt-cloth('green') work in CSS.
Pixes music starts playing as buildings explode
Minimalism is a major factor for cognitive accessibility. If you build for the lowest common denominator then of course qualities like control must necessarily take a dive. If Google gave you more controls for search then it'd be better search, but then it wouldn't be as minimal anymore.
On software you have lots of room to hide complexity for the pro user, but that's not the case for hardware.
Those systems taught people how to use them, and didn't necessarily sacrifice everything to a series of wizard screens. I think somewhere around the point where design decisions started being made to help onboard people into a piece of software or hardware faster, we lost the joy of digging deep in the user manual and finding cool shit.
(I settled on a classic analogue Timex with a leather strap. Can't beat them, really.)
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.
What you are talking about is economics. Its possible to deliver good results faster/cheaper and the result is more timeless. Also clean interfaces are putting function and content in front. Thats why companies choose this.
So dont blame the designer but the boss/manager. Its like saying that app is slow because devs are lazy.
My go to case and recent obsession is the NYC subway map. Here is the 1970s Vignelli map. https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/massim... Here is the map that has been in use for the last 40+ years. https://new.mta.info/map/5256
Designers tend to love the Vignelli map, but everyone in the city hated it and it was short lived. To this day you can still hear condescending remarks like the Vignelli map was "to abstract for NY". "NY choose the worse map". But its exactly like you said, first and foremost the point of design is to download information into brains, and by that metric the current map is far superior which is why it won.
Consider the background geography. Ardent supporters of the London Tube / Vignelli style insist surface streets are clutter full stop. Maybe that reduction of information makes sense in London and Europe where streets are a mess anyway, but in a grid city that reduction doesn't make sense. The present map simplifies the streets down to just a few representative examples so you know the local orientation of the grid and have a few reference points. Simplification, not reduction. The information is still there.
The coloring system is another massive example of simplification. The Vignelli map seems to hate information compression, insisting every line have its own color and own dots. The current map reduced clutter by organizing lines by where they run in Manhattan, denoting the express/local difference with black/white dots. Personally I think that symbol could be less arbitrary, but most people have no trouble figuring it out quickly. Its a simplification down to a single line which makes everything fit in a tight space while being easy to follow. There have been changes in service patterns which have ruined parts of the current map, but the very original version had some nice symmetry to it (and mostly still does). Even though the rule is technically "color by Avenue in Manhattan", that rule lined up with certain repeating "color zones", eg both South Bronx and Flatbush being Green/Red, Upper West side and New Lots being Blue/Red etc. You could sort of count on certain colors to be associated with certain broadly defined endpoints.
Perhaps, this example, being so utterly detached from the modern web design world, is one you might use simply because no one has any personal stake in it. Its a lesson designers should learn more often. Hiding and removing != simplifying. Good != pretty. Organize information well and its often close to pretty on its own.
(I have plenty of gripes with the present map but that's for another time)
Those designers were/are more illustrators than designers [1]. Design is, or at least should be, as much about the function of an object as about it's looks. A design that hinders functionality isn't a good design.
[1] I call the modern breed of such designers "Dribbble-driven"
I keep thinking back to the winxp to 7 era (along with the various windowblinds/uxstyle third party skins), plus various furniture, fittings or tools/utensils/appliances from decades/centuries past (so antiques essentially). The physical items would have textures from the materials used and the processes to make them, maybe they'd be gnurled to add a grip, but also elaborations that aren't purely functional or just to make it look nicer. When you're familiar with those visuals they do seem to help you know what part of it you're looking at, and how it's going to act if you grab/click any given point.
Scrollbars are now an annoyance (when they're not hidden) as they're often low contrast and made to fade into the background, just another dull rectangle in a sea of others, rather than a distinct bit of UI chrome. There used to be a unique inline and small grooves at the centre point as I remember.
I'm not about to declare having the pendulum swing to the other extreme would be better, but it'd be interesting to see it explored again.
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.
Who is this Brian you are speaking of?
(For that matter I don't know how I'd get it done for a professional project either.)
Windows Phone in particular was a huge breath of fresh air for me (rip) and Material Design a welcome evolution that I still feel strikes a decent balance.
Nothing looks as dated as "futuristic" stuff.
Other than this demo, the only 3D effects that actually work (ie 3D movies) are in VR
I actually tried something like this and talked to lots of potential users about this (during 2020 pandemic). But the willingness to pay for the camera is quite low.
My guess is that the brain detects that the motions and such are not quite right, and like a wrong eyeglass prescription, your brain and eyes work overtime trying to figure out compensation.
I later switched to i3wm and threw away desktop effects though. I wouldn't mind them, but I don't miss them either.
https://youtu.be/nbCg9_YgKgM
For a blast from the past
I remember spending a lot of time trying to get Compiz to work. The rain effect was my favorite, it even had windshield cleaner!
Edit: here's the rain effect - https://youtube.com/watch?v=1ZKmQS_MNAg
Barely anyone else puts the effort into getting gestures right. Part of that is the developers spend so long developing the gestures, they don't know whats natural and whats not anymore.
Big example is windows precision drivers. In theory they should be more natural, in practice they are terrible.
Anecdote aside, would this potentially change if it was done for something with utility like data visualization? Unlike a VR headset or the original demo, you don’t need to something radically different to experience something radically different ie holding or wearing an IR light. You just start using it with your existing hardware
It always seemed gimmicky to me, but I’ve heard that the Mario brothers 3D worked a lot better with the depth element than in any of the remakes (I did it enjoy it just fine on my switch)
It was fun and worked pretty well, but it was very much a gimmick.
EDIT: Just saw the other comment, I didn't know the New 3DS had actual eye tracking. Neat!
I think the original 3ds's lack of tracking is what turned it off for most people, though.
He managed to get a brand new in box one, not spoiling if it works or not you'll have to watch to find out...
Think of it as the perfect approach for pirates with no friends.
[1] https://www.misappliedsciences.com/home/technology.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82eAnMpeNZ4
Really? Who thinks this in 2023? I thought it was a fun little demo back then, but that was it. Both then and now I just want AR as the default for everything and for screens to die already. We've had the tech for it since then too, but not enough demand from general consumers.
I said AR because I meant AR.
But it seems like an interesting technique. I wonder if it would be more applicable to an iphone app where the hardware is more consistent.
Sure it requires extra hardware, but it's amazing in first person games that support it. You get to use your good monitor, don't get dizzy like in VR and it could be quite cheap.
I think implementing similar thing with just camera and computer vision is a good idea, let's make this more common thing.
There have recently been some cameras released that don’t require ir-clips and offload the computer some, but feels =\ having a webcam requiring constant camera and/or tracking.
But for games it’s great and already in use.
A system that uses a visual light camera and no reflector clip will inevitably be slower, as it is a much harder computer vision task. But I don't think hardware acceleration comes into it anywhere.
Also they'll analyze your face and send it to the ad tracking agency.
No.
I like the idea, but don't know if people are ready to grant webcam permissions to untrusted any websites.
1: https://charliegerard.dev/blog/interactive-frame-head-tracki...
If you thought recipe articles were terrible today, just wait until you have to pay 0.01 for their life story and then 0.03 for the ingredients only to discover that it will cost you another 0.15 for the actual instructions.
Crypto-powered micropayments could potentially massively boost revenue for content creators, including socially valuable platforms such as news sites.
Research indicates the ideal reading speed for corporate PR emails is 40 wpm and your teamwork KPI at review time will be stack ranked based on how close you move your eyes to the ideal 40 wpm reading rate.
Or lie to you? VR storefront eh? Bet the product will look a lot better than it actually does in real life.
This is what TFA quoted as an application for the tech, virtual storefronts presumably for physical products.
> Whoops, looks like you may have blinked or looked away! Please try again. If you have run out of verification cans, you can say "I love Cosco" to temporarily credit your account with one VCT while we dispatch a new box to your address.
That's the shop's data, not Shopify's.
Bias: my team at Shopify helps merchants launch their shop and get their initial sales.
What's a more likely and more powerful pitch that the marketing team could use to better increase sales of the Shopify platform given this tool they've developed:
1. You can make your stores more FUN! With this little funny tool. 2. You can have more accurate tracking data on what your user is looking at at every moment when they're browsing your website's catalog.
Why not both, really? It's not in Shopify's interest to keep eye-tracking data, but it is in their interest to encourage people to use this feature because we all know this kind of data is a selling point for an e-commerce business.
You really sound like the gun manufacturer that, after a mass shooting, says it's not the people that are flooding the market with guns that are the problem but the individual that did the shooting. This discourse might resonate with some, but not me I guess.
What I'm saying is that individual stores can track their customers however they like, but that there isn't an overall tracking system across all stores.
Shopify's selling feature is that your data is your own. Your customer data is your own and not used by Shopify. That's the competitive advantage over Amazon, who will look at your sales data and use it to compete against you.
It would be penny-wise but pound-foolish to do what you suggest.
Shopify is developing tools that can be used to do harm or to do good. But when they develop tools they know will be used for surveillance, then they can't just wash their hands away. There is responsibility there. Shopify knows how people are using the tools they are creating.
I think facilitating independent shops is positive, but developing more and more tracking functionality to get these shops to be "data driven" is harmful to society. Although that seems to be "the market pull", a lot of times the most ethical choice is not necessarily the most profitable one. Shopify wants to compete with Amazon and they believe a good way of doing that is offering their customers (business owners) better ways to track their customers (shoppers).
All you're doing is giving a third party the gun and your justification seems to be "well if we don't do it, they'll get their guns from amazon anyway". Who owns the data matters, I agree, and I commend Shopify for that, but it's a problematic trend that is being facilitated by these tools anyway. I mean, we should get rid of the guns, not go "we need more good guys with guns". That's my opinion at least.
Heres a similar system: https://youtu.be/Hfz82-EaOQA
There are great applications for virtual reality for instance in medicine. But in general 3D is only needed when it is needed. If it is not needed then pushing it onto users becomes a distraction.
[1] https://www.medicalvr.eu/
I'm surprised more games haven't experimented with this. On PC, a barrier might be knowing the camera parameters and screen dimensions, but those can be easily calibrated, as the article shows.
On consoles, however, we've had cameras for two generations now, and the technology has been mostly underutilized for gimmicky features. The only game I know that did something really interesting is Alien: Isolation on PS4. With the PS Camera, it could do head tracking and noise detection, for some very cool interactions.
The microphone is also severely underutilized. There are many neat applications, especially today with AI voice recognition.
I don't exactly recall why but I think it's just that there are so many cues that you're looking at a screen that your brain won't accept that it's really a 3D scene.
It's a bit like those painted or chalked perspective illusions. They look great in a photo or video. Not so much in real life.
(I don't think it's because of stereoscopy because I am stereoblind.)
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...