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.
While modifying pedals is risky, maybe you could take an OBD-II data stream and turn instantaneous power output into sound, or vibration... or lower your music volume the harder you push it...
I was interested in exploring to give more physicality to the virtual objects , they are "opened" , they "moved " I was playing with the idea if they can be "lifted" or be able to "stick" with pressure etc.
I like the idea of being able to enter into BILLY MAYS MODE just by furiously typing.
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.
Now, applying inertia for the movement itself would be annoying. Please don't do that. :)
When you mention CoG, spinning etc. it becomes game-like — not something I would want in a productivity focused interface. But if you're developing a game or a toy experiment, go for it.
Designing for visual is what is missing, I would want to work on the visual plus audio to compliment the "heaviness" I think someone else also mentioned in the comments on experiments with audio to express physicality to
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.
[1] http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/~ben/references/gaver_the_son...
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!
Physical objects interact with their environment in certain ways as a reflection of what they are, it is certainly an interesting question how this could be extended into the digital domain.
rtgfhyuj•1mo ago
shiveeshfotedar•1mo ago