[HN Gopher] Could we make the web more immersive using a simple ...
___________________________________________________________________
Could we make the web more immersive using a simple optical
illusion?
Author : guiambros
Score : 562 points
Date : 2023-03-04 00:50 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shopify.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (shopify.github.io)
| blindriver wrote:
| Is the web being more immersive really something we want or need
| as a society? I'm hoping that my kids learn to reject it, even
| though it's been my career for 30 years.
| [deleted]
| VLM wrote:
| Has anyone considered the supply vs demand problem or perhaps
| there's a better way to phrase it?
|
| Yes, that is a VERY attention grabbing presentation for
| consumers.
|
| Why is it dead in the market?
|
| Lets consider the SUPPLIERS.
|
| I would love to buy antique used electronic gear off ebay with a
| full high res 3-d model of the actual device I'm buying. Lets say
| its a Tek 700 series oscilloscope because I love paying insane
| shipping fees, or maybe I'm just insane (note WRT this being an
| insane hobby, I need lead-silver solder, vacuum tube tester,
| etc). I need full photographic high res 3-d models of that
| particular scope including all its "problem areas" and partially
| replaced 'black-beauty' capacitors (or are those a HP-only
| thing?) and partially replaced leaky electrolytics and toasty
| looking resistors and all kinds of fascinating detail, including
| exterior shots, and all sub-chassis inside the machine.
|
| The problem is IRL you're pragmatically honestly lucky to get a
| single real photo of the device you're buying; not uncommon for
| someone to copy a pix of someone elses device when selling you
| theirs. "well its close enough' and in a certain defocused
| abstract sense that's even true...
|
| So ... we've solved the viewer-consumer side but who's going to
| generate the models for most realistic apps? Like consider
| clothing sales online. I need a new shirt for the gym, and its
| cool in an abstract sense that I could see "a model" wearing my
| future shirt, but I'd be pretty interested in the experience of
| seeing "me" in the shirt as opposed to the model.
|
| Where is the data going to come from, if/when we have a way to
| display it? I think this is the business problem where the
| display tech is stuck...
| ETH_start wrote:
| Need web camera integrated into the monitor and segregated from
| the motherboard so that these kinds of features can be provided
| without the risk of the webcam being hijacked and used to spy on
| the user.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| once_inc wrote:
| Medical VR [1] is a great example of that.
|
| [1] https://www.medicalvr.eu/
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Why did Shopify of all companies do this? Who would give Random
| Joe's Shopify Store the permission to use their webcam? This
| looks like an absolute waste of time and money and a very
| impractical thing to use in general.
| lancebeet wrote:
| There are niches in e-commerce based around specialized tools
| which require more permissions and user engagement than a basic
| store site. In some cases, such tools account for a significant
| portion of the total revenue. It's not surprising at all to me
| that Shopify would invest in this type of technology, and I
| would assume that other big players are doing the same.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| What niches and what specialized tools are those?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| TL;DR: the parallax effect only looks 'impressive' on video,
| because our brain inteprets it as part of the filmed environment,
| but when you sit directly in front of the screen the illusion
| falls apart (unless you use some stereoscopic optics to trick
| your brain again into intepreting the parallax effect as 3D).
|
| It was the perfect nerd-bait for YouTube, but not much more ;)
| yafbum wrote:
| Are there any phone apps that do this kind of head tracking using
| the front-facing camera? I imagine this would simplify the camera
| calibration setup since most phones have a known geometry
| relating the camera to the screen location, unlike most webcams
| valine wrote:
| Amazon built an entire phone around the idea back in 2014. They
| had cameras on each corner of the phone to improve the effect.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/18/5821294/amazons-fire-phon...
| drewbeck wrote:
| This plus tracking phone position plus ML vision to fake up 3D
| from the front facing camera could make for a very cool
| FaceTime "portal" experience
| boffinism wrote:
| No because:
|
| > for the optical illusion to work, you must place the virtual
| camera at the position of one of your eyes and close the other
| one.
| tuukkah wrote:
| However:
|
| > _Note, however, that it's still a really fun effect if you
| use the midpoint between the eyes and keep both eyes open. It
| just doesn't pop the same way._
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Agreed. I disabled that iOS background effect where it moves as
| you tilt your device. It was interesting for the first couple
| times, then annoying.
| permo-w wrote:
| could a (much) bigger screen compensate for this?
| maverwa wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| This is starting to happen to me with bad AI art. Subtle things
| that I didn't notice for month now look glaringly out of place.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > 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
| shaunsingh0207 wrote:
| 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.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| 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.
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
| ithinkso wrote:
| The sole reason I had compiz back then was to have the cube
| effect. I do miss my cube even in i3
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
| atorodius wrote:
| Oh wow, wobbly windows. I miss them.
|
| https://youtu.be/nbCg9_YgKgM
|
| For a blast from the past
| napsterbr wrote:
| Oh good times. With Firefox 2 (or maybe 1.5?) no less!
|
| 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
| wastholm wrote:
| 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.
| amsterdorn wrote:
| How hard would it be to implement for a more popular webcam, like
| the one on a Macbook?
| Fell wrote:
| I think the technology might be more portable if you use a
| somehow-worn camera looking at the screen. The screen could
| display a calibration pattern and the camera could analyse it.
| Maybe a phone app would work. I think on phones it might be
| possible to retrieve the intrinsic values of the camera.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > And even if all that becomes possible, will users be willing to
| close one eye to enjoy immersive experiences? That's a question
| we can't answer.
|
| No.
| k__ wrote:
| When I read the title, I was hoping for something related to
| static images that look different than they are.
|
| Like, bouncing objects on grey surfaces, or dots that aren't
| there
|
| I would love to see these illusions explored more and used to
| enrich UIs in some way.
| bawolff wrote:
| Having it be targeted as in-browser, not to mention for shopping
| (?!) Is weird.
|
| 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.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| Shopify serves online vendors.
| bawolff wrote:
| Sure. But that doesn't totally dissolve them from the
| proposed usecase being non sensical.
| cush wrote:
| The final demo was so slow and unresponsive compared to the
| 2007 version
| knolan wrote:
| This seems like the kind of thing the FaceID sensors in iPad and
| iPhones could achieve. I've been impressed with its use for face
| painting in Procreate for example.
| funstuff007 wrote:
| Coming from Shopify, this feels like a ZIRP (zero interest rate
| project). i.e. projects that need not bear any fruit in the next
| many years. Snark aside, this looks very cool, and I definitely
| see use cases in gaming (and maybe in web home pages--assuming
| you could get the client to turn on the web cam for an unknown
| site).
|
| In the article I see no mention of accelerometers. Can one get
| nearly the same effect on mobile merely using these and not using
| the camera?
| davidlumley wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1: https://charliegerard.dev/blog/interactive-frame-head-
| tracki...
| urbandw311er wrote:
| This is the perfect example of a really cool solution desperately
| looking for a problem
| moremetadata wrote:
| If you watched the link, you'd see the 3d effect, so is it
| looking for a problem when 3d is the holy grail of av
| entertainment problem?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Not sure what makes you think I haven't watched the video! I
| watched it in full. But I don't agree that 3D at home is a
| "holy grail" - for starters I've not seen any clear evidence
| of market demand.
| chaostheory wrote:
| A flat screen is a problem if you're designing a 3D object. The
| flat screen is also a problem if you're trying to figure out
| what's wrong with a patient with flat charts.
|
| Imo the real problem is more a lack of imagination mixed with
| too much fear.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| It's ironic that 15 years later, the latency between the movement
| of the camera and the targets has only got bigger (original video
| vs the first one in the "Final prototype" section).
| pxmpxm wrote:
| First thing I've noticed as well - feels like the same 1990s VR
| experience.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| To be fair, they're running it entirely in a web browser using
| only software with no specialized hardware.
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| And probably hasn't been optimized nearly as much as it
| could. It's clearly meant as a fun tech demo / early
| exploration.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| The article states it could be really improved by using the Iris
| model, but I believe the MediaPipe Iris model is embedded in the
| FaceMesh model. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
| calny wrote:
| Iris is a separate model from face mesh, but it relies on face
| mesh for part of the pipeline
|
| > The first step in the pipeline leverages MediaPipe Face Mesh,
| which generates a mesh of the approximate face geometry. From
| this mesh, we isolate the eye region in the original image for
| use in the subsequent iris tracking step. ...
|
| > Face Landmark Model
|
| > The face landmark model is the same as in MediaPipe Face
| Mesh. You can also find more details in this paper.
|
| > Iris Landmark Model
|
| > The iris model takes an image patch of the eye region and
| estimates both the eye landmarks (along the eyelid) and iris
| landmarks (along this iris contour)...
|
| https://google.github.io/mediapipe/solutions/iris
| donatj wrote:
| Oh man, I remember this YouTube video at the top from when it was
| new. There was a lot of cool uses for the Wii remote when it
| first came out.
| sammalloy wrote:
| Not bad, but I'm a bigger fan of the AR portals we've seen all
| over Reddit and Instagram for the past year, the most recent of
| which featured a virtual portal on the beach that you could walk
| inside and explore. I'm pretty sure everyone here has already
| seen it. This would allow you to devote a spare room in your
| house, for example, for the virtual space (or storefront). Why we
| don't already have this is very frustrating.
| xwdv wrote:
| Ah yes, an excuse to get consumers to adopt eye tracking at
| scale.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I'd really like to see this combined with photogrammetry, so that
| in video chat you could see the other person with this kind of 3D
| effect (and maybe also adjusting the eyes a little bit to allow
| for eye contact). Could be great for work meetings and online
| tutoring.
| liendolucas wrote:
| I think this has been achieved on Google's research project
| Starline: https://blog.google/technology/research/project-
| starline/
| kqr wrote:
| If this requires looking at it with one eye only anyway, would an
| eyepatch with something like a QR code on it help calibrate the
| system live?
| nikanj wrote:
| Instead, we decided to eliminate all visual cues for
| actionability and context. The modern UX designers hiss and
| scream if you suggest something as banal as 3D
| psuedo_uuh wrote:
| > Imagine, for example, opening your favorite brand's website and
| being presented with a miniature virtual storefront.
|
| I would puke
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.)
| bentt wrote:
| Phones seem like a better candidate for this. The iPhone is
| already equipped with a fast and accurate depth scanning front
| camera.
| metalrain wrote:
| 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.
| avereveard wrote:
| 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.
| tapland wrote:
| 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.
|
| But for games it's great and already in use.
| dTal wrote:
| 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.
| stevofolife wrote:
| Aside from the skepticality of the proposed product & business
| idea, on the technical side there is tremendous value from
| accessible, robust and portable eye tracking. During my undergrad
| I was fortunate enough to work at a neuroscience lab where we
| built a 3D Unity game interfaced with a joystick, ECoG, and eye
| tracker to study attention and learning. If nothing has changed,
| Tobii is still the global leader in eye tracking hardware [1].
| They have a wide ranging of products to choose from depending on
| your budget.
|
| [1] https://www.tobii.com/
| mahkeiro wrote:
| It may work for platform like ipad that have limited number of
| configurations. Not sure though that Apple will be open to it.
| julienreszka wrote:
| The original demo looks much more responsive
| noduerme wrote:
| This is super cool. I wish WebVR was still a thing and that it
| had gotten more love, better browser support and more libraries
| adept at handling head tracking, stereoscopy, etc. During that
| brief period where it was standard in Chrome, I happened to be
| bidding a bunch of interior architectural designs for a client,
| so I scrapped together a demo script in ThreeJS that let me
| stitch together prerendered stereo panoramic renderings, and
| insert some interactive 3D objects / animations inside the
| skylight space. I patched in support for the pointer remote from
| the original Oculus Rift, and just stuck our architectural
| renderings on a private website and mailed the client a couple
| Oculus Rifts as a gift to check them out. It was a big "wow"
| factor and landed us a lot more work.
|
| None of this is to say that it would be a great idea to build
| websites this way. Websites are made to convey the desired
| information quickly, so _unless the desired information is a full
| 3D understanding of a space_ I have a hard time seeing the
| utility of building out a 3D space _as a metaphor for
| information_. Did that make sense? Let me say it differently: We
| 've tried a lot of visual metaphors in my life for organizing and
| exploring information spaces. As it turns out, the simpler ones
| are usually the most easily grasped and therefore the most
| efficient at doing their job (i.e., remaining "invisible" and
| serving as a transparent container for information). Even 3D
| interfaces that _do_ serve the purpose of conveying spatial
| relationships and art often fall into the trap of trying to do
| too much. This is not meant as a paean to minimalism (at all - I
| love clever interfaces and I appreciate when information design
| makes you figure out a paradigm to get the most out of
| interacting with it - as long as "the most" is defined as more
| interesting views of the data I'm trying to get at). Just to say
| that design should showcase content, _not itself_ , except in the
| case where the content is supposed to showcase the design, and
| then you can go nuts.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| WebVR is still a thing with WebXR and at least the browser devs
| at Meta are pushing it forward.
| bbbbbgdn wrote:
| couple live web demos with similar approaches you can check
| (!need a webcam for this to work) https://cables.gl/p/nrv_-a
| https://cables.gl/p/2Zf0Hk
| bbbbbgdn wrote:
| I believe you need immense precision of tracking for it to look
| decent, cause brain notice all the imperfections and gives you
| motion sickness
| braingenious wrote:
| No.
| [deleted]
| scambier wrote:
| 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.
| sundvor wrote:
| The end product looked just like what putting on my TrackIR
| headset and booting up DCS World is like. :) Nice write up
| nonetheless.
| bobnamob wrote:
| Cynical take: Seems like an excuse for Shopify to add eye
| tracking to product pages for ad analytics
| 6177c40f wrote:
| Unfortunately it's stuff like this that's poisoned otherwise
| cool new tech for me. I can't help but wonder "how will this be
| used to advertise to me?"
| nottorp wrote:
| > I can't help but wonder "how will this be used to advertise
| to me?"
|
| Or lie to you? VR storefront eh? Bet the product will look a
| lot better than it actually does in real life.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| If the VR is good enough, why would you even bother to
| visit it in real life?
| nottorp wrote:
| To see the actual product they're trying to sell?
|
| This is what TFA quoted as an application for the tech,
| virtual storefronts presumably for physical products.
| once_inc wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Micropayments existed long before bitcoin and adding a
| blockchain mostly just makes them more awkward.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Bitcoin has a throughput of 1 KB/s for the entire world, so
| it will never be used for micro transactions.
| ETH_start wrote:
| 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.
| dmtryshmtv wrote:
| This is implemented in the Brave browser.
| koonsolo wrote:
| But then you need something like Nano instead of Bitcoin,
| which has 0 fees. Ideal for such micro transactions.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| 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.
| theK wrote:
| Or invade my privacy otherwise
| VLM wrote:
| 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.
| mabbo wrote:
| 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.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Y'all are happy to spam people with onboarding messages at
| the email address that a customer gave you and you didn't
| bother to verify.
| wraptile wrote:
| I'd imagine not many people are willing to give the webcam
| permissions to e-commerce shops.
| VLM wrote:
| They will during the next lockdown when its give permission
| or don't order food online to eat.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| > 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.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| There is no value in reading text and looking at flat images in
| 3D and there are significant reductions in usability.
|
| The reality is the fixed flat scrollable page was a huge step up
| from the real world reading experience.
|
| Reintroducing 3D in a 2D space in a real 3D world is beyond
| useless without a dramatic shift in what media is consumed. And
| there is no atomic element of media right now that might benefit
| other than Instagram adding lights-box size 3D image to its feed
| for ads.
|
| Wait... oh no...
| dalbasal wrote:
| The techniques themselves are very cool and inspiring.
|
| That said, the reason such things do/don't take off isn't about
| how cool they are, generally. It's about how useful they are.
|
| Even for games, immersion and realism are secondary to gameplay.
| For most applications, it's hard to see how a "realistic window"
| is useful. A flat paper, paper-like screen is better to read off,
| for example.
|
| Cool tech. Definitely worth exploring gaming potential. Not easy
| to apply to other uses. There's no benefit to making an online
| shop window more like a real shop window. Catalogue is what you
| want in any case.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Just apply this to CAD or 3D modeling software.
|
| I can also see doctors having a use for this tech
| anon115 wrote:
| at first id think this was cool but moving my head constantly
| isnt that gonna start hurtin?
| anon115 wrote:
| i think keeping the 3d AR aspect of it and moving the
| object/mesh with a very intuitive controller for 3d sculpting
| instead of having to turn my head and walk around behind it
| to modify it is the way to go.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| The fire phone did this 7 years later with 4 front facing
| tracking cameras and nobody cared
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
| valine wrote:
| The 3DS don't do head tracking, it was a real 3D display that
| displayed a unique image to each of your eyes.
| astrange wrote:
| The New 3DS also did eye tracking, which is why I said it
| did.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Did it do head tracking?
|
| 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)
| shaunsingh0207 wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| The original 3DS didn't but the "New" one did eye tracking
| like this, and for both eyes since it had a 3D screen.
| ywain wrote:
| 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!
| speps wrote:
| Relevant video by DankPods: https://youtu.be/nJRYDbV7jr0
|
| 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...
| chaostheory wrote:
| 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.
| Peritract wrote:
| > Imagine, for example, opening your favorite brand's website and
| being presented with a miniature virtual storefront. You could
| look at their most popular products as if you were standing on a
| sidewalk peering into their shop.
|
| I am imagining it, and it's worse than the current norm.
| mihaic wrote:
| This is exactly why I think 3D TVs died out a couple years ago:
| once the novelty factor fades away, you realize that it's
| actually hindering your initial goal.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| Nah, it was because the costs of the content were always
| significantly higher than other content.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Besides the cost, they died because for a large portion of
| the population and a large portion of the supposed 3D media,
| the 3D effect didn't work. It just gave people headaches and
| eye strain.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Not to mention all of them being locked to 60 Hz input
| while proudly advertising 600hz refresh rates (mostly
| plasma). Literal dark ages
| hgsgm wrote:
| > Imagine, for example, opening your favorite brand's website
|
| My what?
|
| Do these people ever leave their fantasy land?
| itissid wrote:
| Storefront branding using "smart" displays has been a variation
| on the same regurgitated idea since 1908[1].
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfridges#Windows
| mihaic wrote:
| Physical stores already are in 3D, the internet is a
| different medium that actually is composed of multiple
| mediums, depending on what device you're accessing the
| content from.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I'm the sort of person who loves a solution without a problem and
| will devote months or years to it for zero result.
| [deleted]
| jemmyw wrote:
| It doesn't work if 2 people are looking at the screen?
| DrewADesign wrote:
| 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.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Perhaps the pixels could be directional [1] [2]. Not sure if
| vaporware or an actual product, can't find more details since
| the Delta airport video.
|
| [1] https://www.misappliedsciences.com/home/technology.html
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82eAnMpeNZ4
| chaboud wrote:
| It doesn't even really work for two eyes if the viewer is close
| to the display. Close one eye to really nail the illusion.
|
| Think of it as the perfect approach for pirates with no
| friends.
| exodust wrote:
| Even the pirates with friends likely do their online shopping
| solo. Like most of us do.
| wmil wrote:
| 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.
| Haga wrote:
| [dead]
| codeulike wrote:
| _Imagine, for example, opening your favorite brand's website and
| being presented with a miniature virtual storefront. You could
| look at their most popular products as if you were standing on a
| sidewalk peering into their shop._
|
| I imagined this as instructed as was simultaneously bored and
| depressed.
|
| Why does it always have to be about shopping.
| icepat wrote:
| > Why does it always have to be about shopping.
|
| It's published by Shopify, so in this case it's because it
| likely would not have gotten published otherwise. Unfortunately
| E-commerce companies are not known for their "research for the
| fun of research".
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Or, imagine your head tracking data is being uploaded and sold
| to the hugest bidder! They could tell whether you have a health
| condition which they could sell you an expensive drug for! Or
| raise your insurance rates! Wow this IS exciting.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The smart watches already provide a lot more data such as
| heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and activity monitor to name
| a few things. However, it's just a part of the little data
| collector that nearly everyone has in their pocket.
|
| My point is we're already there and we've been here for years
| now. If laws like the GPRD passed, then it should be possible
| to counter or neutralize the problem
| mr_sturd wrote:
| Because it's the web, and that's _all_ the web is about.
| osrec wrote:
| It's a lot of what life's about though too, so perhaps it's
| justified?
| otikik wrote:
| For every article about shopping we would be seeing tens of
| thousands of articles about breathing then.
| radec wrote:
| Justified in the sense that we should accept that there is
| no other purpose to life or existence then to shop?
| chaostheory wrote:
| Because this is from someone who works for Shopify and has to
| justify their 20% project to their bosses.
|
| Why can't people have a little more imagination and see this as
| a great new data visualization UX like for things like charts
| or maps, instead of automatically panning it to death?
|
| This could be very useful in hospitals.
|
| CAD and 3D modeling software?
| rchaud wrote:
| > Why does it always have to be about shopping.
|
| the subdomain of this submission offers a clue about that
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The blog we are reading right now is Shopify's blog, so I have
| a theory.
|
| Another interesting question is "Why is shopify's blog the
| place talking about this, instead of somewhere else?" I
| remember that demo... it was amazing and then it did go
| nowhere. With modern face recognition and tracking, it should
| be entirely possible to use it for some nifty no-touch
| experiences.
| majgr wrote:
| Well, it made into Amazon Fire Phone, and then went nowhere.
| codeulike wrote:
| _The blog we are reading right now is Shopify 's blog_
|
| tbh I gave up reading after the bit I quoted and hadnt
| actually clocked it was a Shopify blog (didnt spot the little
| icon in the corner or look at the url)
|
| Still, I stand by my refrain " _Why does it always have to be
| about shopping_ " as a refrain that is rarely out of place
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Here on the internet, there's nearly three things to do!
|
| https://youtu.be/G9FGgwCQ22w?t=183
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's a relatively invasive technique that requires a computer's
| camera to record details of a person's face, and that's
| marketable data that any commercial shopping site would likely
| collect and sell on to other parties. It'd be much simpler to
| implement arrow key / spacebar navigation through a 3D scene
| (still computationally expensive relative to rendering the
| standard HTML/CSS/JS page), but then that data couldn't be
| collected.
|
| In general interactive 3D on the web still uses too much
| computational power on the client-side for most devices.
| Filligree wrote:
| "Details of a person's face is marketable data".
|
| Okay, it's not that I don't believe you, but what do they
| _do_ with that data? How does it help? Unless you 're
| marketing acne cream, I suppose.
| rvba wrote:
| Some bad actor would check out what is in your apartment
| and then market to you.
|
| Say they see you have legos, they market legos.
|
| Or they see what you have (say a gun) so they rob you.
|
| Or they track your habits. We noticed your apartment is
| dirty/messy - pay us a ransom or we post on linkedin or
| call CPS. Or use our cleaning service.
|
| Also I bet you have to walk fully dressed when browsing
| (especially women) and you need to shave, or your social
| score drops.
|
| Ah and will you know if the website ever stopped watching?
| Is it watching you (and recording) having sex?
| labcomputer wrote:
| Uniquely and reliably track a single individual's web
| browsing habits.
|
| Is that not the holy grail of adtech?
| orls wrote:
| People who fit into <some racial/ethnic/age/gender bucket>
| spend more time looking at <x products>, fed to advertisers
| who can tie it to swathes of your other online activity
|
| Even if it's _theoretically_ coarse data/bucketing, that
| adds up to a lot of data to help deanonymization and
| targeting. Even if that's done in the spirit of "just for
| ads", it's not a big leap to political targeting etc, and
| with the right data leaks, potentially even actual
| harassment.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| Couldn't this sort of thing be built into the browser which
| could then just expose an API for head orientation and eye
| position without any privacy invading details?
| kibwen wrote:
| Physically you'd still need to have the camera on, and
| having the "your webcam is in use" LED become ever-
| presently on defeats the ability to detect when the camera
| is actually being used as a camera.
| Cpoll wrote:
| > invasive technique
|
| It wouldn't be so bad if it were a browser feature, i.e. a
| website can use an "Eye Tracking" API instead of the Camera
| API (with permission granted), and get limited data.
| jszymborski wrote:
| But of course, just like gait detection and etc... there
| would be a whole genre of preprints dedicated to eye
| tracking fingerprinting
| VLM wrote:
| It has to be about shopping because pr0n actually drives new
| tech and that venue would not be pr0n friendly.
|
| I would imagine this would be an obvious easy sell for CAD, so
| there must be something wrong with it, perhaps a patent,
| holding back progress. I will say that I've done CAD for
| projects (woodworking and making STL models for 3d printer) and
| people who do not CAD think that CAD people look at 3d
| animations 99% of the time, but IRL when I do CAD I spend most
| of my time thinking very abstractly (how to balance the spacing
| of power supply and PCB such that it looks nice, is easy to
| access, thermal concerns, wire routing... Or I can look up the
| clearance hole dia for a 4-40 screw now what is a common drill
| size with sane tolerances to drill it, how about an eighth of
| an inch?)
| riidom wrote:
| I imagine a youtube where the ads would pause as soon as you
| don't look at them anymore. Like that one black mirror episode.
|
| But yes, first promote some gimmicky fun stuff to get the foot
| in the door and when it has arrived, show the real face.
| VLM wrote:
| The other way around, for sure, to distract and make you look
| back at the thing moving in the corner of your eye.
| hgsgm wrote:
| They mean that the ad won't finish until you watch it.
| hammock wrote:
| You've heard of YouTube Red? Now try A Youtube Orange
| staindk wrote:
| "Please drink a verification can"
|
| https://imgur.com/dgGvgKF
| blamazon wrote:
| "McDonald's!"
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/TheStreet/status/161288860119643
| 3...
| [deleted]
| totetsu wrote:
| I briefly used a trial of an eye tracking mode for macOS. It was
| like having telepathy
| 31337Logic wrote:
| There was a time when the "web" was text only, lightning fast,
| and not unrelentlessly trying to hijack my attention. For a truly
| unique experience (for some), let's try bringing that back and
| see how people feel about all that free time they get back.
| divbzero wrote:
| 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.
| permo-w wrote:
| I'd much rather scroll through thumbnails
| exodust wrote:
| 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.
| sjs382 wrote:
| I once saw a digital pinball machine with this sort of head
| tracking and the effect was WILDLY effective.
|
| Heres a similar system: https://youtu.be/Hfz82-EaOQA
| pluc wrote:
| Sure. Get rid of marketing and advertising and then we can start
| to talk about it.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| God, someone _please_ make the web more immersive!
| SquareWheel wrote:
| For the intrinsic parameters of the webcam, that is a property of
| the hardware and not your room, yes? If so, it seems possible to
| crowdsourced that information to build a database. Then for most
| users, it's just a matter of entering your product model rather
| than taking 50 checkerboard photos.
|
| It's still not convenient, but it's a much smaller hurdle to
| overcome.
| Animats wrote:
| That idea has been around for years, for "virtual windows". This
| is from 2010.[1] The illusion only works for one person at a
| time, so, as a window, it's not too useful. For games, as someone
| pointed out, it works fine.[2] Although it hasn't gone
| mainstream.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqu9NuINKbc
|
| [2] https://www.trackir.com/
| [deleted]
| jclarkcom wrote:
| I replicated Jonny lees demo to see how it looks in person but
| soon learned the problem is one of optics. Without presenting
| the content at the right focal depth you don't get past
| accommodation and binocular convergence conflicts. Without
| shutter or polarized glasses you also don't get past binocular
| cues - so it looks great on a video where there is one camera
| view but once you add a second human eye it stops looking 3D.
|
| I started a company to try to solve these problems without
| using head mounted displays and we developed 3D displays that
| work using an array of rectangular lenses and micro displays
| plus fresnel lens sheets. We adopted this approach to a new
| product category we called virtual skylights where we replicate
| the look and feel of an open sky with a distance sun above you.
| As you walk around a room the sun will follow you in the sky
| across units due to the optics and there is no need for active
| head tracking for this particular case. The effect is really
| amazing even though the content in this case is super simple.
| Hard to experience on a 2d screen but we have some videos of it
| here, in the reaction video you can see how people react to
| seeing it the first time.
|
| https://www.innerscene.com/a7/videos
| liendolucas wrote:
| Hats off, not only for the product but also for pursuing and
| solving the problems that you mentioned! Really cool! Just
| curious, is the technology prohibitively costly for
| individuals? If so, do you have any plans to make it
| accessible to mainstream public?
| jclarkcom wrote:
| Thanks! Yes - we are getting installed in a number of homes
| as well as businesses. We are still at the higher end of
| the market, but comparable in cost to a real skylight after
| install and maintenance cost - and you can put it in places
| where real windows or skylights are impossible. We are
| working on some pretty low cost models now and will have
| something this summer I think will work for most home
| owners. In some parts of the world we sell through partners
| who maintain their own pricing, so we don't have public
| pricing on the internet but I'm happy to give you some info
| if you shoot me an email at jonathan@innerscene.com or DM
| me here.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| fho wrote:
| We use this concept to great effect in a [CAVE] where we were
| limited to 2d projections. The thing that many are not aware of
| is that stereovision is just one of many ways we perceive depth:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception
|
| [CAVE](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Automatic_Virtual_Envir
| on...)
| ergonaught wrote:
| The web is plenty immersive when there aren't 84738473 ads and
| user hostile UX layouts and popups and shifting layouts and all
| the other things everyone ought to already know are bad.
| chaostheory wrote:
| The alternative is that nearly everything worthwhile is now
| behind a paywall, which is the reality now. HN audience can
| afford the paywall. However, large number of people in world
| cannot. Piracy is not a sustainable solution either.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| A bit depressing in some ways. This is a pattern I've seen
| repeatedly, especially in the last 10 years or so - people want
| to do something innovative but shoot themselves in the foot up
| front by insisting it has to be in the browser. Then they
| discover that browsers are incredibly hostile environments for
| doing innovation projects, and instead of concluding the obvious
| (we should do it with a desktop app) they either ship something
| far worse than their original vision, or decide it can't be done
| at all.
|
| This one gives off especially Stockholm Syndrome-y vibes:
|
| _> You need the physical dimensions of your screen, which can't
| be queried even in modern web browsers ... That's precisely what
| we needed, but MediaPipe Iris isn't exposed to JavaScript ...
| Despite our failure to ship this to a massive audience, we still
| think it's important to take a step back and marvel at what's
| currently possible in modern web browsers ... It's hard not to be
| excited about the future of the web right now._
|
| Seriously? Their project failed to replicate a demo from 2007
| partly because browsers don't expose the APIs they needed or even
| basic data you could get easily from Windows 95, yet modern web
| browsers are a "marvel" and "it's hard not to be excited about
| the future of the web right now"? How is that exciting? How is
| any of this a marvel? It seems the opposite of exciting to me; it
| shows that browsers still, after 30 years of continuous
| development, cannot be used to push technical boundaries.
|
| The sad thing is their project didn't have to fail. They could
| easily have shipped Lee's demo on Shopify sites by writing a
| small native app for Windows and Mac, then making it download if
| the user clicks "View stereoscopically". The app would have
| access to the screen geometry and additionally detailed data from
| the camera driver, which could then be used to look up the
| necessary data from a Shopify API where they have pre-calculated
| the metrics for the most popular brands. On Windows the number of
| clicks required would be identical to in a web browser, because
| whilst the user would have to click the download in their tray to
| start the 3D view, as a web app they'd have to click a permission
| button to grant webcam access anyway so it amounts to a very
| similar UX. (On macOS Chrome it'd take one further click, on
| macOS Safari it will extract a .app inside a zip for you, so the
| number of clicks is equivalent to Windows).
|
| It's because of repeated frustrating experiences like this with
| teammates in my own prior research projects that I eventually
| took the time to write Hydraulic Conveyor, because part of the
| reason devs are so reluctant to go outside the browser is that
| the distribution DX is traditionally quite terrible. Conveyor
| makes massive improvements there. The goal is to have a DX
| similar to shipping a (static!) website and it gets very close to
| that indeed.
|
| Still, even now that distribution is fixed there are other
| reasons why research teams dig themselves into web-shaped holes
| like this. Not all of them can be fixed with software:
|
| 1. Experience. According to the StackOverflow survey, half of all
| developers have been devs for less than 10 years. We can safely
| assume that only a tiny minority of them have ever written a
| native app for Windows or macOS. Also about 50% of devs "dread"
| working with C++, rising to 60% for C and a whopping 75% for
| Objective-C, so that's not really conducive to working with the
| Windows or Mac APIs (Swift and C# do better).
|
| 2. Disinterest in learning. Probably due to "resume driven
| development"; we devs always have one eye on the next job and
| what skills will be attractive to future employers. This can
| cause appropriate tech to get stuck in a catch-22/local minima
| where people don't want to learn it because other employers
| aren't using it, so people don't use it, so people don't want to
| learn it, etc. The strongest engineers will figure out what tech
| is most appropriate for a project and learn it if necessary even
| if that skill may be a one-off for that employer, but especially
| for people earlier in their careers they may prefer to
| aggressively chase what's popular to unlock job-hop pay rises.
|
| 3. The (inaccurate) perception that people don't download desktop
| apps. The proliferation of popular Electron versions of websites
| and general apathy towards PWAs is perhaps starting to correct
| this but it's still an issue I see sometimes.
|
| 4. Ideological loyalty. People like the idea of
| community/collectively developed open source tech, for all sorts
| of valid reasons, but this can easily turn into blindness. A
| complete failure to implement a 15 year old tech demo despite
| using vastly more advanced technology is objectively not
| "exciting" or "a marvel", it's actually quite embarrassing for
| our whole industry. But if you're emotionally committed to seeing
| technological progress through the lens of an ever larger HTML5
| spec and nothing else, then it may seem somehow like this is
| still progress.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| In light of the current top comment thread [1], I'm glad the
| state of browser APIs is holding back this particular
| "innovation". And I wonder if the friction of distributing and
| installing desktop apps is actually a good thing, even though
| it's affecting my current (non-AccessKit) project. It means you
| have to be really sure that what you're doing deserves to exist
| outside the good constraints of the browser.
|
| I'm not a fan of VR in general. Some of us aren't comfortable
| navigating the physical world, and we don't want an emulation
| of the physical world to infect the digital (or more
| accurately, hypertext) world that we love and consider our true
| home. As Jakob Nielsen said in 1998, the Internet can be better
| than reality [2].
|
| [1]: for posterity:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35020429
|
| [2]: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/better-than-reality-a-
| funda...
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I mean, sure, I personally wouldn't care for this feature,
| but that's because I'm a bloke and don't derive much joy from
| shopping. My girlfriend though absolutely loves window
| shopping. I think this sort of feature would be far more
| appealing to her than me.
|
| For better or worse we can't know how popular this sort of
| thing would be, because their project failed for tech reasons
| before even getting to the point of doing market research or
| usability testing. That's the higher level issue here, I
| think. If they'd gone the desktop route they could have at
| least tried it and seen what people thought, then later
| looked for ways to shrink it down to fit inside the browser.
| By starting with that requirement as axiomatic they never
| even got as far as running a usability testing day.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| To clarify, my objection isn't merely that I dislike that
| feature, but that I'm concerned about it becoming a fad
| that gets foisted on those of us who don't want it and
| possibly can't use it (due to accessibility issues) but
| still have to buy stuff, access educational/training
| content, etc.
|
| It would be better, IMO, if the web could get back to
| having multiple browsers that are serious about acting as
| user agents for a variety of users. Then, freed of the
| expectation that the browser must render a pixel-perfect
| presentation of the UI as it was designed, some browsers
| could provide a VR interface to the lovely accessible
| hypertext that sites should be providing as their one and
| only version, while other browsers provide a TTS-optimized
| UI, a Braille-optimized UI, a UI optimized for large fonts,
| etc.
|
| Put another way, I think the web community should redouble
| its efforts to achieve the things that Hixie apparently
| gave up on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34622514
| mock-possum wrote:
| > It's unbelievable how much it feels like the OP-1 field is
| floating out of the screen. It's almost as if you could reach out
| and grab it.
|
| I can certainly agree with that, it's a real solid
| brusspup[0]-level illusion... but I'm not sure what to do with
| that, practically speaking, beyond "oh that looks cool." It kind
| makes me wonder whether my standards for 'immersive' are
| significantly different than theirs.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeQEKFH31vvD-InkTGSvCrA
| bm3719 wrote:
| 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).
| ilkke wrote:
| 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.
| chaostheory wrote:
| 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
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > Re UI, my theory is that this is partly because minimalism
| doesn't become dated as fast.
|
| Nothing looks as dated as "futuristic" stuff.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| 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.
| wolpoli wrote:
| 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.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I would assume this to be possible with CSS houdini,
| which extends CSS with custom JavaScript.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| dgb23 wrote:
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Neo brutalism?
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Brian may love patterns and minimalism, but I am Ryan and I
| love chaos and maximalism.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| What if I told you Ryan and Brain were the same character
| this entire time.
|
| _Pixes music starts playing as buildings explode_
| noduerme wrote:
| 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_.
| threatofrain wrote:
| > 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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_.
| omnimus wrote:
| 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.
| keyringlight wrote:
| 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.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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)
| _dain_ wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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"
| Hendrikto wrote:
| > Brian loves patterns, that's all there is to it.
|
| Who is this Brian you are speaking of?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| The name's Damage. Brian Damage
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > 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.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| If instead of "very easy" would you be happy if I said
| minimalism is the "least hard" to pull off?
| sings wrote:
| 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.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| 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.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Personally, I view Apple more as a fashion house that
| sells tech.
| nfgrep wrote:
| Those fashion designers make a pretty mean little RISC
| chip.
| varjag wrote:
| Minimalism is helluva easier in dev. Throwing a few solid
| filled rectangles is sure cheaper than painfully drawing
| skeumorphic features.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.)
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| Why not use the system default controls and not reinvent
| the wheel?
| astrange wrote:
| Because nobody else did, including the system.
| seemack wrote:
| 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.
| dreen wrote:
| 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.
| jimworm wrote:
| One potential life-changing application I haven't yet found for
| eye tracking is to train monocular people to align their blind
| eye properly. I don't know if it's possible, but if it is at
| least partially successful for a monocular person's simulated
| depth perception, it could improve their eye contact with others
| and benefit their social lives immensely.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'm fairly convinced that the immediate potential of AR is tricks
| like this, which will whet people's appetite for more.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Maybe. But when Apple added that kind of parallax/motion to
| iPhone/iPad people flipped: "It makes me feel sick." Well, some
| people.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| Did it use eye tracking or was it just using the tilt
| sensors?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Tilt.
| undersuit wrote:
| I audibly exclaimed WTF when they walked towards the screen. I
| was not ready for that effect.
| [deleted]
| nwoli wrote:
| It's possible to just convert the iris model to onnx then to tfjs
| btw. I got 90% the way to doing it once but basically concluded
| it's entirely feasible
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I still remember the first time I saw the Wii head tracking
| video. I had no idea anything like that was possible. I don't get
| why it didn't take off
| russdill wrote:
| 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
| goodcjw2 wrote:
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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."
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| > drink your verification can
| in3d wrote:
| A couple of 3D display products are coming this year:
| https://www.leiainc.com/newsroom/reservations-open-for-world...
| and https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/asus-new-16-inch-
| wor.... As my username might suggest, I'm excited! I hope they
| become less niche with time.
| hoc wrote:
| Excellent. Thanks for those links.
|
| Toshiba and HTC had this around 2011 when the mobile OSes were
| really bad with no updates available, phones produced by HW
| companies like Toshiba who had no idea on how to support sich
| HW software-wise. Even the Laptop 3D screen's drivers used to
| break with the next larger Windows update.
|
| So I'm happy to see these devices return. I hadn't thought that
| this would happen anytime soon. However, theses are integrated
| devices again. Bit afraid that the support will be as short-
| lived as back then.
|
| We haven't kept our FHD 3D TVs for the same absence of updated
| 3D TVs. But these have unified interfaces at least (Packed HMDI
| Stereo and SBS or TOB for normal HDMI). So maybe a standard
| external devices might make more sense than those integrated
| tablets and laptops.
|
| Time to charge my Fuji Real3D cams once again, I guess.
| social_quotient wrote:
| 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.
| meatmanek wrote:
| glue together web audio spatializaton and the coordinates of
| the window and you've got it.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...
| defend wrote:
| Seems interesting especially for the gaming industry, but it
| seems like it'd be exceptionally difficult to handle the
| edgecases in the real world; for instance multiple pairs of
| eyeballs staring at the screen.
|
| This, alongside various privacy concerns of eyeball tracking,
| will likely nip this technology in the bud.
| meindnoch wrote:
| The latency makes it feel wobbly.
| Reimersholme wrote:
| [dead]
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Interesting thing with the targets demo - less so with the zombie
| - but I notice that I only needed to shut one eye for the first
| few seconds to make the targets "pop out", and after that it
| worked for ages with both my eyes open.
| startupsfail wrote:
| Getting the camera intrinsics problem is might be solvable with
| the dataset of intrinsics (assuming that the browser allows to
| get the camera model ).
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| You can pose estimation of these parameters as an optimization
| problem. https://sites.google.com/ttic.edu/self-sup-self-calib
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| This must be one of those new definitions of the word "simple"
| that I haven't previously encountered.
| gslaller wrote:
| Why not use a tensorflowjs pose estimation model? They mention
| MediaPipe Iris but didn't find any tensorflowjs model??
| https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/posenet/cam...
| kilgnad wrote:
| Immersion isn't really a problem. When I buy stuff online or get
| money from a bank I'm not looking for immersion.
|
| What I'm looking for is a fast load and snappy ui.
|
| When I watch a movie or play a game, that's when immersion
| matters.
| TootsMagoon wrote:
| Tilt Five has a take on this. https://www.tiltfive.com/
| sublinear wrote:
| > 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.
| pugworthy wrote:
| AR as in overlay on what you're looking at, or VR as in replace
| everything you're looking at?
| sublinear wrote:
| I didn't even mention VR and I am so beyond tired of it being
| brought up every time AR is.
|
| I said AR because I meant AR.
| pugworthy wrote:
| 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).
| Groxx wrote:
| Broadly speaking: yes! I wish we used this more, it's not hard
| and it looks very convincing and subtle stuff feels quite good...
|
| ... when latencies are VR-like. When it lags even a little, it
| feels _awful_. So it tends to work pretty well for tech demos
| like this, and _not at all_ when exposed to the real world.
|
| Specialized hardware and software stacks can do a pretty good job
| - see the Fire Phone for an example there. It did quite well on
| technical notes, the experience was smooth and battery-
| efficient(-enough) and the illusion was almost fast enough to be
| transparent.
|
| But it failed. Unless we get this kind of thing baked into
| everything _for years_ , it will continue to fail, because there
| will be no content. And integrated webcams and their related
| software continue to be utter shit. We're not close to (or even
| moving towards) being able to use this, unless Apple surprises
| everyone in their next lineup and kicks off a renaissance.
|
| ..... and that's before getting into privacy issues with exposing
| an API that reveals info about your face. It's a harder
| _practical_ realm than it seems it should be, when people have
| been making very effective tech demos for decades on commodity
| (but _specific_ ) hardware.
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