(2023-06-08) Hon S15e01 Marks On Flat Planes

Dan Hon: s15e01: Marks on Flat Planes. Yes, I suppose I have thoughts about Apple Vision Pro just like everybody goddamn else and I don’t know – I’m just tired?

First: the marketing communications around Vision Pro was weird and I think in places a little tone deaf

Second: okay, that aside, the choices in the product design are interesting in the abstract. The pass-through! The externally visible screen! The wonderfully crisp UI that’s rendered in spatially situated detail

But in the same way that the iPad is still growing into its “what’s an iPad best at, Conan?” age, the reason why I think Vision Pro looks dystopic is because it’s our crapsack office information worker interfaces (i.e. giving a goddamn powerpoint presentation) but, you know, with a thing on your face

Lastly, and the part that I got most stuck in thinking about, is what Vision Pro can be used for right now

looks super dystopic right now for information workers/knowledge workers [sic] is that all information work is still broadly document-centric (document-oriented), which means windows of things that still broadly look like bits of paper. (WIMP)

the current method of working with documents, i.e. Mac apps or iOS apps in a window in a space has simply (I acknowledge that “simply” is doing a lot of work here) been ported over for lack of something better.

If not windows, then what would be the equivalent of a spatial presentation that isn’t the equivalent of a piece of paper projected onto a 2D plane? Does it end up being an Unreal/Unity volume environment you can navigate through?

There’s a counterpoint here that “documents” – that is, things that are the equivalent of marks on paper – are actually really good at what we need them to do in terms of preserving and communicating information

That’s for viewing and editing. One thing that could be different, that we haven’t yet seen, are spatial interfaces for document management, but I’m not optimistic that we’ll get to see those for a couple reasons.

First: your regular “document management is search now” argument; insert the regular rant about Google Drive.

It’s curious, because you have applications like Miro and such that have no problem with being infinite 2D canvases with grouping and, well, what if Miro were your document management interface? (infinite canvas)

Second: I think “files” haven’t been in Apple’s vision of the future of computing for a long time, ever since iOS.

in a spatial computing environment gravity isn’t a thing.

I wrote earlier that noise-cancelling headphones are a thing and what would distraction-cancelling look like? What would mess-cancelling look like?

I am neatly skirting every single issue to do with the other physical aspects of this kind of spatial computing, namely that it visually presents as shutting yourself off from the outside environment

We build private spaces for ourselves and we try to create private spaces for ourselves.

To paraphrase Danny Lavery, I think, an evolution from “what if phones, but too much?” to “what if being alone in a room, but too much?”

In the next section, I briefly note what caught my attention about Erin Kissane’s essay, Tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow and her remarks about the patterns of spaces, and now I am thinking about our expectations of spaces. ((2023-06-01) Kissane Tomorrow)

1.2 Some smaller things that caught my attention

Make a thing designed for one thing do other things

Caught in loops in spaces

Shitty studio notes

I dropped into the Near Future Lab’s Future of Hollywood General Seminar a few weeks ago. Here’s a couple of my notes from our session on “interesting things that might exist in the future” as, uh, provocations

TikTok’s duets feature is the ultimate yes and feature that makes improv easy. Which means I also have to reference the book Impro for Storytellers.