If you’re interested in spatial interfaces it’s worth looking at John Underkoffler’s work (Minority Report and Oblong Industries).

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_pointing_to_the_...

Spatial Interfaces are highly underrated and misunderstood. In the field where I operate (UI/UX design) there are 2 loud camps: Pro skeuomorphism and Pro flat. IMHO, both miss the point. Spatial interfaces are under explored, even though it's how our brains operate. I'm currently studying the topic of spatial interfaces regarding how our brains work. Or at least, the little bit we know about how memories and thoughts are formed. Space is a centre piece in how our minds operate. If you haven't already, read about the memory palace and how spatial interfaces help our brains remember things better.

Sococo's overhead map feature looks really cool. One of those things that seem like they would be obvious after you see them but almost nobody thought of.

This article speaks to me. For language learning and teaching, take a technology like Mumble(1) with positional audio and integrate it into a game so you hear those around you as in real-life?

Or what about taking a chapter from a textbook and making it into a level in a game? The spatial world would help players to remember and fix things in their memory, and they could always return to review.

Or a game tailored for language learning through real world situations, where a teacher sets up a 'lesson' and then the students bring it to life. Maybe that shopkeeper is a native speaker calling in and playing. The possibilities are endless.

And this sounds amazing; bringing physicality to ephemeral webpages that are here and gone the next moment:

"I could place my personal site on a street near the websites of my friends. We could form a little village. I could then go to my favorite sites and walk around nearby to find sites like them. This is a spatial interface that would give us a new and intuitive way for navigating the Internet and understanding how websites are related each other."

1: https://www.mumble.info/

The point of video meetings and "who goes next" is valid. Have actually had the exact issue. Simple fix could be to order the faces the same way on everybody's screen.

If I'm have one-to-one meeting, I prefer to site face-to-face with other person. Of course with multiple participants this is not possible. Wouldn't it be an example of "bad skeumorphism" if the video conferencing would take these real-life limitations to software? While the grid-of-faces is not natural, it allows you to see everybody at once.

One thing about interfaces of graphic programs I recently realized is - they all force the user to decide up-front how big the image is going to be, and where it will be placed in the frame.

So if you "paint yourself into a corner and want to extend the image one way - you have to select everything, move it, and scale the canvas or the selection aproprietely.

This could be done automatically by the program every time you add new details. The canvas could just as easily be infinite.

Very interesting research domain, on the one hand computers are so powerful because they can decouple us from our spatial reality, on the other hand we need the spatiality to be able to navigate the computational structures.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff definitely also research Embodied Cognition theory.

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