[jazzyjackson]

This was one of my first thoughts when I tried Hololens back in the day -- it would be great to watch the execution of my software, or visualize all the messages being passed between functions or different services on my network, and go all in on block-based programming in 3D (trees can be packed more densely in 3 dimensions, even moreso in 4)

I was expressing this to a friend who was involved in VR in the 80s (VPL research) and was simultaneously elated and disheartened to learn that they had the same idea ! Googling around for it now I suppose he was telling me about "Body Electric" or "Bounce" and looks like any other 2D data flow language [0]. Maybe just ahead of its time. A patent about it [1] describes the problem with wires going everywhere and needing to provide the user the option to hide any set of connections. I'd want to accomplish this by representing the whole connectome in 4D space, and then shifting the projection into 3D to hide and reveal a subset of connections. Further visual filtering could be performed with a depth of field focus and fog effect, controlling all these parameters to isolate the subset of the system you want to inspect.

[0] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/bounce/SpaceSeedCircuit...

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5588104 (bonus, figure 3 shows the dataglove as just a hand plugging into the PC)