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by wangchow
3475 days ago
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In this age we need to think about things like voice control and 3D manipulation of data-structures and a dynamic view of the code. We can truthfully keep designing 2D editors (and we will always most likely use them to some extent) but I believe it is more important to consider different UI paradigms altogether. For instance, what about editing a living code environment? Game development is very immersive: you can manipulate a running environment and see results immediately. How can this be extended to other development tasks like server-side development? What if, when you select a for loop from code fragment a 3D visualization of the programs data structures at that point is shown to the user. What if you can, instead of launching a debugger, run the debugger as you're writing the code and step forward and back and see these visualizations change? We have all the technology. It's time to get to the next level. |
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I run a Vive on linux. Which required my own stack. Which took excessive time, and is limiting, but has some road-less-traveled benefit of altered constraints. So I've gone to talks, and done dev, wearing Vive with video passthrough-AR, with emacs and RDP, driven by an old laptop's integrated graphics. Yay. But think 1980's green CRT (on pentile, green is higher res). In retrospect, it was a sunk-cost project-management garden path.
There's been a lot of that. One theme of the last few years, has been people putting a lot of effort and creativity into solutions to VR tech constraints, only to have the constraints disappear on a time scale that has them wishing they had just waited, and used the time to work on something else. It's fine for patent trolls (do something useless to plunder future value), and somewhat ok for academics (create interesting toy), but otherwise a cause for caution.
So on the one hand, I suggest that if the center tenth of VR displays had twice their current resolution, everything else being current tech, we would already be starting on a "I can have so many screens! And they're 3D! And..." disruption in software development tooling. But that's still a year or two out. Pessimistically, perhaps even more, if VR market growth is slow.
In the mean time, what? Anything where the UI isn't the only bottleneck (work on the others). Or which can work in 2D, or in 3D-on-2D screen (prototype on multiple screens). Or is VR, but is resolution insensitive, and doesn't require a lot of "if I had waited 6 months, I wouldn't have had to roll my own" infrastructure. Or which sets you up interestingly for the transition (picture kite.com, not as a 2D sidebar, but generating part of your 3D environment). Or which can be interestingly demo spiked (for fun mostly?).
For example, I would love to be working on VR visual programming on top of a category theoretic type system. But there seems no part of that which isn't best left at least another year to ripen. Though maybe 2D interactive string diagrams might be a fun spike.