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.

• s1mon

  today at 12:34 AM

  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.

• fragmede

  yesterday at 9:33 PM

  > 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?

  • brody_hamer

    today at 1:01 AM

    > 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface

They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!

• stephen_cagle

  today at 12:26 AM

  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?

• trgn

  yesterday at 8:31 PM

  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.

  • stronglikedan

    yesterday at 9:02 PM

    > 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.

    • stelonix

      yesterday at 10:45 PM

      I always think of Johnny Mnemonic when I see such interfaces. One of the reasons I got into computers as kid. Hackers (1995) also had a great (Hollywood) computer interface that shares some similarities with it.

    • trgn

      yesterday at 9:05 PM

      didnt know, it's on my watchlist now!

  • projektfu

    yesterday at 8:36 PM

    I am too lazy to do the work but in that time frame I considered that a zooming/hierarchical view would be a nice way to browse the web, with followed links appearing as new pages next to the current page. The web became too dynamic for that anyway.

    • hn_acc1

      yesterday at 11:40 PM

      OS/2 Warp's browser did that - it kept a tree of parent and child nodes (indented) as a history type of thing..

• bonestamp2

  yesterday at 9:58 PM

  Figma is a good example of this UI paradigm done well, lots of users, and financial success.

• mrtesthah

  yesterday at 11:46 PM

  >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.

  • projektfu

    today at 12:55 AM

    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.

• yesterday at 9:57 PM

• esafak

  yesterday at 8:36 PM

  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...

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.

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.

• mncharity

  yesterday at 10:22 PM

  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.

• thaumasiotes

  yesterday at 9:10 PM

  > 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.

  • Zircom

    yesterday at 9:14 PM

    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.

    • thaumasiotes

      yesterday at 10:21 PM

      I know that. They define an additional dimension to the tabs. Most dimensions aren't spatial.

• ge96

  yesterday at 9:02 PM

  What if... imagine stacked skewed windows and you scrolled through them like a rolladex

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.

The title doesn't do this justice. I would so love for this to be a finished polished product that just works.

• efields

  yesterday at 11:52 PM

  I’m ready for Apple to swipe the basic idea and roll it into the next version of macOS. Gels nicely with the spatial widget work they do on visionOS. Deprecate stage manager while you’re on it.

  • swader999

    today at 12:04 AM

    Maybe but I like the idea of it serving as an agent sandbox or context boundary which is probably too specialized for Apple to build into the OS.

• abelsm

  yesterday at 11:54 PM

  thanks! we wanted to put it out there and see if there's interest before investing more time in polishing it. it's been really helpful to see the discussion here.

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.

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.

• tclancy

  yesterday at 10:30 PM

  I can’t help but see this as a productivity illusion. “Hey now I really can work on three things at once”. Then someone asks you a question a week later and you have zero memory of doing anything with that project.

• fragmede

  yesterday at 9:35 PM

  The collaborative feature seems like it would be useful, especially for remote teams.

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

Widgets are back! Finally.

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

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

In the mid 90s and early 2000, all Linuxes had virtual Desktops.

• graemep

  yesterday at 11:10 PM

  They still do. My first thought was that virtual desktops and moving when you hit a screen edge gives you may of the advantages of this.

Looks very interesting - is it open-source yet?

• abelsm

  yesterday at 10:58 PM

  Cofounder of FlutterFlow here. Not atm, as it started as an internal project. But it's something we're considering.

SimulaVR is interesting (VR Desktop) but I was writing code in the middle of the salt lake flats super weird