Very interesting, I'm wondering how that would feel in XR!
I already have quite a few demos with manipulating files, e.g. Immersive file browser (via remote WebDAV directories) https://video.benetou.fr/w/rHZTnX5MnHdWvWTPa2Rsw4 so curious how I could try that there.
In WebXR there is no pressure value but maybe more fingers could be needed. Also maybe for heavier files there could be some "lag" where the cube representing the file does follow the pinched fingers but with some delay proportional to the file size. Any suggestion welcomed!
I agree that providing something more tangible than just a number would be beneficial for some operations. But I think it would get annoying quickly. Having difficulty moving a "heavy" file is the opposite of a good user interface. Every manipulation should require as little mental and physical effort as possible. Apart from that, I can't apply force with my mouse — it just clicks.
I believe a purely visual approach could work well. For example: every file icon has the same front area (basically the rectangles we have now), but visually extends to the back with some sort of stylized 3D effect, according to file size. So a small text file looks like a thin sheet of paper, a 10MB file might look like it's made of thick cardboard, a 2GB video looks like a box with considerable depth. The scaling should probably be logarithmic, not linear, to work well with human perception.
See "Sonic Finder" for the Macintosh.[1] Heavy folders made bigger thumps when opened, or dragged and dropped. It was not widely used and disappeared. I did try it once. Cool, but not useful.
Heavy is relative. If you're working with videos, everything is heavy in terms of file size relative to most files. Yet, a small text file could be just as important as any video.
I think this is a fun thought experiment that is fundamentally a bad product idea.
I think this type of concept is worth exploring. Side channel feedback to the operator of a machine is getting less noticeable. Hard drives don't whirr and click like they used to. Cars don't have transmissions that shift.
When you pick up a physical object with your hands, you don't assume the heavier the object, the more important it is. Same with file size.
But if you pick up your carton of eggs every morning you'll know if you have enough left to make an omelette.
If you make a backups it would be nice feedback to feel it weigh about what you expected. When making room on a disk you could juggle a few folders to feel if they'll fit or not.
There was some advanced facility (nuclear reactor? particle accelerator?) that laid microphones near the machinery and put various speakers in the ceiling of the control room; helped precisely detect and pinpoint problems immediately.
That said I'll prefer just seeing the size of the file or folder in bytes as a number.
I'm personally more interested in feeling other system metrics, like network traffic or memory bandwidth.
I've always thought it would be neat if the accelerator pedal on cars had some sort of force feedback that was proportional to the amount of power the engine is putting out. That way the driver would be able to feel how hard they're demanding the car to work, and hopefully they would adjust their driving habits to go slower on steep hills, not hard accelerate out of traffic lights, etc.
That was entertaining to try as a demo, but I did not enjoy the UX of it because I don't have a proper sense of how much force I'm using on a touchpad. I have poor dynamic range in the amount of force I exert there.
Awesome. I want to marry this with a concept I had a while ago around a computer keyboard with pressure sensitivity that adjusted the font size in proportion to how hard you struck the keys.
I like the idea of being able to enter into BILLY MAYS MODE just by furiously typing.
You might have to mess around with the software to figure out the details, but from a hardware perspective a hall effect keyboard should be at least able to infer the speed a key is travelling at when bottoms out.
But they don't take more time to move (on the same partition). Also it would be nice to see at a glance if a folder contains a lot of data (number of bytes, not files) before starting an operation.
if you are moving a folder of files within a partition (hey, this was your idea) then you don't care how many or how big they are. only if you move them to a different partition would you care, but in that case as you hover over the other partition, you'd want the folder to become helium or hydrogen light, so you would need to exert more force to get it to touch down in the folder. oh the humanity!
You can emulate pressure sensitivity on Android by tracking the change in the radius of the touch point. With a little effort, it can be made to be nearly identical to the iOS system. I'd go into it or link you to some code, but it was like a decade ago that I last did it. I just remember I got it to work and it was fun.
I still miss it. Worse was they didn't just remove the hardware on newer models, but older models that did have the hardware available had the functionality removed overnight by an iOS update. If I recall it was over some licensing/patent dispute. (plus the feature itself was somewhat polarizing, not everyone found it intuitive)
Interesting concept, but it feels difficult to use. I do think it's a cool demo!
One conceptual issue I noticed with using it is that force touch requires pressure in the opposite direction of how I would understand weight and mass. It feels more like... I'm trying to think of a physical example, trying to force down something with buoyancy. I also expected the weight to affect how fast I needed to drag my finger, but once I exerted enough downward pressure, both heavy and light objects moved the same.
I already have quite a few demos with manipulating files, e.g. Immersive file browser (via remote WebDAV directories) https://video.benetou.fr/w/rHZTnX5MnHdWvWTPa2Rsw4 so curious how I could try that there.
In WebXR there is no pressure value but maybe more fingers could be needed. Also maybe for heavier files there could be some "lag" where the cube representing the file does follow the pinched fingers but with some delay proportional to the file size. Any suggestion welcomed!
I agree that providing something more tangible than just a number would be beneficial for some operations. But I think it would get annoying quickly. Having difficulty moving a "heavy" file is the opposite of a good user interface. Every manipulation should require as little mental and physical effort as possible. Apart from that, I can't apply force with my mouse — it just clicks.
I believe a purely visual approach could work well. For example: every file icon has the same front area (basically the rectangles we have now), but visually extends to the back with some sort of stylized 3D effect, according to file size. So a small text file looks like a thin sheet of paper, a 10MB file might look like it's made of thick cardboard, a 2GB video looks like a box with considerable depth. The scaling should probably be logarithmic, not linear, to work well with human perception.
[1] http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/~ben/references/gaver_the_son...
I think this is a fun thought experiment that is fundamentally a bad product idea.
When you pick up a physical object with your hands, you don't assume the heavier the object, the more important it is. Same with file size.
But if you pick up your carton of eggs every morning you'll know if you have enough left to make an omelette.
If you make a backups it would be nice feedback to feel it weigh about what you expected. When making room on a disk you could juggle a few folders to feel if they'll fit or not.
There was some advanced facility (nuclear reactor? particle accelerator?) that laid microphones near the machinery and put various speakers in the ceiling of the control room; helped precisely detect and pinpoint problems immediately.
That said I'll prefer just seeing the size of the file or folder in bytes as a number.
I'm personally more interested in feeling other system metrics, like network traffic or memory bandwidth.
I like the idea of being able to enter into BILLY MAYS MODE just by furiously typing.
One conceptual issue I noticed with using it is that force touch requires pressure in the opposite direction of how I would understand weight and mass. It feels more like... I'm trying to think of a physical example, trying to force down something with buoyancy. I also expected the weight to affect how fast I needed to drag my finger, but once I exerted enough downward pressure, both heavy and light objects moved the same.