ThreeJs
I started with Pointing to the Future of UI, noting that the video came out 14 years ago I was eager to see how the predictions in the video have played out. John Underkoffler is giving a pretty impressive tech demo of this gestural multi-dimensional (6 dimensions) interface, claiming this to be the future of UI. Although not really integrated into the operating systems we use today, you can see more and more similar interfaces and interactions being made these days, especially with the advent of recent years' technological advancement in AI tech. But I must say, and this is I guess related to when we talked about where to insert yourself, I'm not sure about this.
When apple introduced their computers for the first time, one of the reasons people liked them is because they offered a great deal of abstraction — they took away so much of the friction, gave a more seamless experience that is highly communicative, easy to understand and use, and of course — pleasant on the eyes. But it also took away a lot of control; you didn't need to know how to program in order to use a computer anymore, you could just easily interface with the affordances Apple have decided are useful to you (and profitable to them). Similarly, the demo in the video is about making things easier for us — more "natural". But, of course, it requires additional levels of abstraction. It's almost like there's an inverse correlation between how "natural" (or "intuitive" or "smooth" or what have you) an interface is and the amount of control it offers its users.
The question I think a lot of us are asking these days is indeed something like "how much do we need to know?". If a more "natural" interface makes it easier to use then I guess by all means... But I don't think it's one-size-fits-all. I guess it comes down to scalability. The nice tech demo with the editing software seemed pretty futuristic, but how well does it scale to cater to different video editor's needs? We can easily see this happening with other software — you can usually tell when something was done in TouchDesigner (there's a certain look to it), and same goes for Unity and Unreal — they come with these built in stuff that lend a certain look and feel. But all of them are also highly customizable and allow you to pretty much change everything — if you're willing to dive deep enough. Most of Apple's new features they put in their devices is trying to walk this fine line — a presumably seamless and smooth experience that is (to an extent) somewhat customizable. AI does a lot of the personalization for you really. And so I wonder if perhaps the future of UI is a more self-tailored UI, where AI is in charge of translating and communication between people using different UI and OS systems that are tailored to their personal wants and needs. But it's interesting to think about how people have slowly moved from browsing to searching. it's faster—you can just easily get what you want and move on—but it's like the difference between teleporting and walking all the way. Personally, I'd like to take the walk and stop to smell the flowers on the way.
All the metaphor examples in Metaphors We Live By made me think about how color temperature is perceived. Ok, so "happy" is usually associated with "up" and "sad" is usually associated with "down", I guess due to various reasons, but probably due to our body's posture when we feel happy or sad. While some metaphors are sort of derived from things that are kind of already happening in the physical world, color is an interesting case to look at:
This is very basic, but bear with me for this quick anecdote. So in color theory we learn which colors are warm and which are cool:
But physically speaking, cooler colors are actually the hotter ones:
I assume we're not used to associate "cool" colors with warmth because we're usually only exposed to warmth that is in the "warm" color range. Think of a lighter's flame — it's blue in the center where it's the hottest, and red in the edged where it's the least hot. So seems like the notion of warm and cool colors is learned rather than derived from more "absolute truths".
I think probably the entirety of our experience as living beings is this ever-evolving interplay between innate aspects of the things around us and the ideas we have around them, with a varying degree of influence on one another.
I think the ideas of Self and Productivity have really taken over how we perceive life to be. These ideas weren't always there, and they won't necessarily always will, but it takes more than a lifetime to change that. The obsessions we developed as a society with both these concepts have almost come full circle — like the thought of not being productive for one moment is so subversive that we have to disguise it as "self-care", forcing some backwards meaning of productivity nonetheless. And the need to feel comfortable to exist as you just are didn't quite obliterate the boxes society was trying to fit you in — it simply created many many more boxes for you to choose from (and if you don't fit into any one of them, well, there's a box for that too).
But I guess, yes — some amount of self-definition is required — you have to be able to distinguish between yourself and this other person, and their friend. And you can't remember everything so abstractly, so boxes are useful in that sense. But I want to imagine a world where it doesn't matter. I'm going to stop ranting about this now.
But to sort of continue the point about having to have some boxes because it's easier on our brains — I remember reading about how humans developed communication skills at the cost of losing memory capacity — this makes sense, because as we developed highly complex social societies we each needed to memorize less (each person only has to remember a part and not the whole), while the ability to communicate these memories efficiently only became more and more important. Our brains cannot grow any bigger (this is a biological problem. Human babies already have brains that are almost too big to not kill their mom when they're born), so any useful ability we develop seems to have to come at the cost of another. Anyway, in that sense, it makes perfect sense why it's so much easier for us to remember things when we can fit them into what we already know. It's not a completely abstract different taste, it's sweet with a bit of a sour edge to it. But it's never just this description, is it? Even memory palace techniques are not about memorizing the whole thing, but are about creating these pointers to places in our memory, and all we do is go through a unique combination of pointers that yields the specific memory.
To me, sometimes its not a memory, but a feeling. For example, I have a thing with only some numbers that I don't know how to fully explain: I remember dates really well — dates of flights, events, people's birthdays, etc. I also remember my whole family's ID numbers. But I can't with 100% certainty tell you my phone number (I'm serious). I remember all of my childhood friends' birthday dates, and street addresses, but not my credit card number. I guess the pattern is remembering things about others but not myself. But I'm not employing some memory palace technique or anything, I'm not even trying to memorize it. It's like seared into my memory; the numbers + the person = this unique "thing" that somehow makes perfect sense to me (like a unique taste or a color, an identifier, that now occupies a cell in my memory that I can access and from which I can retrieve this information. Brains are so weird.
