By way of the Glue chat comic (interesting ideas, by the way), I came across John Palmer’s excellent posts on spatial interfaces and spatial software. Mmm. As a productivity nerd and a hobbyist toolmaker (there are probably ten or so personal tools I’ve been using over the past several years that I’ve never blogged about, but that’ll change soon), I’m very, very interested in these kinds of ideas. Particularly in using 3D interfaces for productivity. I’ve thought a bit about doing that in VR, but I hadn’t really considered building tools in 3D even outside of VR.
No concrete ideas yet, just little threads leading off to various areas that I’m interested in exploring (todo lists, website/blog engines, writing/outlining tools, etc.).
At this point the plan is to use Three.js for prototyping some ideas to see if it’s viable. My initial sense is that for the kinds of tools I’m interested in, I’ll probably need a good way to render/edit text from within Three.js, and it looks like rendering to a canvas and then using the canvas as a texture will work. Anyway, more to come.