Complexity ≠ Difficulty
In most modern user interaction there is a massive disconnect between the interface and the underlying system that is running. Although some user interfaces may look well designed, often times they have papered over how things work instead of unfolding the complexity in a way that is more understandable. The average person may not easily understand why their computer is doing what it is doing, and delegate this knowledge to the realm of programmers or more technically inclined people.
High complexity, however, does not innately indicate that something is highly difficult. Take all the objects lying in front of you when you're working at a desk. To move all of those items around is a highly complex task that even modern visual tracking algorithms can sometimes struggle with, let alone the mechatronic limitations when it comes to robotics, outside of tightly controlled environments.
You, however, can easily and intuitively move things around and organize them in a spatial environment without needing to directly think about it, which provides a unique and newly available avenue of exploration in the XR and VR space, and it is this innate ability that we aim to harness with Stardust XR's design philosophy, by focusing in on direct interactions that map to underlying functionality.
Direct Interaction Vs Indirect Action
With something like indirect action such as a touch screen on a phone or tablet, you're limited to essentially a few modes of interaction such as tapping or swiping, whereas direct interaction within XR and VR you're opened up to a wide possibility of methods like cutting something in half with scissor fingers, duplicating by stretching an object, plugging one thing into another, etc. Stardust XR's design philosophy allows for the possibility of taking the underlying mechanics and expressing them as full interfaces. With the correct signifiers and affordances that map directly to the things underneath, people can gain an intuitive understanding of how their computer works. Clients and applications can also be designed in a way that allows for a better understanding of what is going on as there is far less obfuscation as to how underlying structures are handling that data.
A virtual environment provides an infinite space in which unfolding complexity becomes much more viable to do.
Part of the goal of Stardust XR is to allow the average user to become a power-user through intuitive interaction; because of the number of ways a user can engage with a 3D environment, this greatly increases the interactive bandwidth a developer can utilize.
Form Flexibility Principle
With a PC, you are essentially limited to a keyboard and mouse; with a touch screen, you're limited to touch and multi-touch; in XR, you have hands, eyes, and body, which has an exceedingly large amount of available bandwidth for interaction.
The more interaction bandwidth you have to offer, the more customizability is not just something that can be done, it's something that must be done to provide an adaptable user experience for real world scenarios. As XR expands into areas beyond just the home and workspace, this becomes increasingly important as the ways in which you can interact with the world is, by default, extremely variable, and Stardust XR's open platform and client creation philosophy allows developers to freely expand these types of interactions to meet the demands that computation brought into a 3D space will bring. From sitting at a small workbench all the way up to a full warehouse, the application space becomes much larger as you incorporate the ability to move through the world with mixed reality. Existing user interfaces of today typically provide limited and hard-coded exceptions to the rules, and only for specific situations or disabilities. By making user interaction systems more emergent, many forms of accessibility become available third party, with broader compatibility.
When you take advantage of the innate interactions and movements that come naturally to people in a 3D environment, and combine that with a library of base interactions associated with underlying computer structures, a system that is both modular and emergent in its ability to grow as XR expands more and more into the real world becomes essential.
Stardust XR is that system 🍉
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