My wife’s old school chum posted an interesting status on his GoogleTalk account.
[stag_image style=”no-filter” src=”https://pixelsandwidgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Bryans_question.png” alignment=”center” url=””]
My wife didn’t have a response, but she asked me what I thought about it.
It struck me that yes, mapping applications are a type of spatial browser, but not in the classic UI design sense (Author’s Note: For a great write up on spatial browsers, look no other place than John Siracusa’s article on spatial browsing in comparison to the OS X finder.app).
Some background on spatial browsing
In short, the spatial browser uses a real-world metaphors, attributing spatial attributes to virtual objects. For example, the notion of your computer’s “desktop”, it’s folders and files are all part of applying a “bricks and mortar” approach to file management (i.e., physical characteristics such as location, size, state, etc.).
Back in 2003, John Siracusa wrote:
Some would say that the Spatial Finder is unnecessarily limiting, and that it leads to a “messy” desktop full of windows that have to be managed manually. Steve Jobs himself has made this claim, condemning interfaces that ask the user to be “the janitor.” It would be better, the argument goes, if the computer could be “the janitor”, avoiding the chaos of multiple windows by divorcing the spatial properties of any given window from the hierarchy of the file system. In such an interface, a file’s position in the hierarchy can be expressed as a simple “file path” in a single window, rather than by the relationships between a series of individual windows.
Although it may offend Mr. Jobs’s aesthetic sensibilities, the simple fact is that humans are much more adept at dealing with visual/spatial clutter than mental clutter. By compromising the user’s ability to manage files and folders based on familiar spatial cues and behaviors, all the complexity of the file system hierarchy is simply moved from the screen into the user’s mind.
The point of the article
But back to Bryan’s question and my response to my wife.
My response to here was something like this: Yes, it is a spatial browser. It has all of the advantages and disadvantages that a spatial browser presents:
- Pro: It’s as real world as you can get
- Con: Just like you lose your keys, prepare to get lost
Point 2 is something that is dear to my heart as a I have piss-poor sense of direction. I think one of the reasons that 3d user interfaces never caught on wasn’t because of fidelity, but rather how humans interact in a 3d world. I wrote about this in 2003:
Humans don’t see in 3D, but rather something like 2.5D–we see a 2D image with an instinctual understanding of the concept of depth (the 3rd dimension). Only after we move within a space do we start to understand three dimensional spaces (try walking in a maze of mirrors). Among women, spatial cognition is also not a typically strong skill (and I would say that is probably correct in most humans as well)–so thus you’ve just handicapped 50+% of your potential user base. Therefore the thought of using simulated 3D, without a real simulation of optical depth just doesn’t make sense to me.
Now in the case of mapping applications, we don’t exactly have 3D–more like an extra two dimensions: longitude and latitude. However, one of the reasons that collaborative surfing has never took off is because it ignored the dimension of time. We surf the web quickly and in a half distracted manner. Temporally speaking, we are surfing either forwards and backwards along a straight timeline (1-dimension), and quite honestly, it is hard to sync up with another person or group of people for that matter. Now with mapping applications, you’ve just added an extra two dimensions with your browse activity–making it a 3D problem of sorts.
But here is the cool thing: We’re not surfing the Web. Rather, we’re talking about our location–and time for us humans, or rather our ability to move around and geo-navigate space is way slower. That means we can have a collaborative experience with other real people nearby. From that we can create a type of momentum as we converge to a single point or move in a single direction. The ability to have voice and IP communication, your social network, it adds a whole new twist on getting outside, sharing, and exploring (browsing) the outside world. Augmented reality–things I’ve been reading about for that last half-decade–it’s getting closer to being real. Who knows, maybe in another 5-years, we’ll see some really cool apps. I bet Apple and Google will be first.
And anything that gets people out of house and exploring their community–with their community in real-time–is a truly great thing.
Leave a Reply