INTERFACE

AVA.AI (Social Thought Media)

Harness Values & AI & UI to Edify Humanity

With AI we can finally organize life's ideas in a healthy way;

Here's the full pitch.

I think best as I draw.

Today I was exploring the most important innovations of the future.

The Cooperating System is my idea of the true metaverse.

AI is already here, we just need to remember to dot our A's.

And curing aging could be symbolized as Human Plus.

I've focused her on fixing the like button UI for #dribbble;

making it obvious wether you've liked this or not,

and implementing proper encapsulation.

Today I've started a User Interface Design Workflow that I could pump a project through and get a Principled Ideal result. I'm going to run a bunch of projects through this to test and iterate on this workflow.

Follow this page for updates to these projects.

Tempus Fugit

Ain't nobody got time for terrible.

In this redesign of TikTok and it's clones,

I've applied interface principles,

to make the most popular app also good.

AI Art Studio

As I continue to imagine the honest AI UI, it seems like it wants to become a point cloud editor where all tools are called for as needed. You talk to MJ and just tell it specificly what you want ina back and forth manner, and you seamlessly travel a shared space of point cloud creation.

Right now we use discord and type commands to interact with the MidJourney AI but what if it had a dedicated interface what could that look like? Here I've imagined just that.

What do you think David has in mind when he is considering hardware plans?

I was thinking of an inpainting physical brush controller that you whisper to and it's VR MJ spirit messes with whatever it can reach. I added controls to expand it's reach, affect... Is this a candidate for an honest ui? Still pretty familiar.

Gamify

Can life be turned into a game? I explored that slightly here.

Hardware

Mac pad

Here I've unified iMac, Macbook, iPad with a modular minimalist concept.

My modularity feature hinges on a motorized hinge that tucks it's pins away until you bring a component near and also is configurable in software for saved angles.

Nintendo Power

Right when the Switch came out I had to try it because I love the idea of modularity, but it was so poorly executed I had to draw an alternative for them. The interface is as easy to use as the PS3's T UI. A couple years later they came out with a similar device the Switch Lite.

Qleek Product Concept

A product that tried to be crowdfunded proposed blocks of wood with NFC chips inside to store playlist and other files for gifting. I reconceptualized this as simple a micro record shaped NFC hyperlink that when tapped on your phone invites you to a link. This would be like a physical link to the internet and would be

Operating System

Android

Pinky Pie Version

What if your home screen wasn't littered with icons, but were all sorted into folders in reach of your thumb. What if this same dock became the dock for each app and it's buttons? What if the notification center was in rach too at the bottom? What if the notification center and control center and app switcher was combined with scalible handles between each?

Rocky Road Version

What if we turned this to 11 maxing out your screen's realistate by using empathy engine and front facing sensors to be readable and reachable but not excessivly wasteful. What if we added teh shortcuts to the list of combined features, each set of features apear depending how high you pull up the bottom everything bar.

Windows

Windows 7 was out and there were legacy features junking up the fresh. I thought I'd try to conceve of a new window where the features were universally availible on an OS level rather than depending on the apps to get along. I also tried to consider tabs for virtual desktops. This was later implimented in windows 10. I also added a fully telling time on a single line which windows sorely lacked, though I should have included seconds. I know it's childish looking but I made this when I was a kid.

I refined it slightly and started to consider the windows like a fluid you could snap together and minimally contain objects but I hadnet considered the load it put on the user's mind as they worked with all the unique unpredictable curves. But every attempt comes with education oppritunities and possible progress. This one saw the start of an infinite desktop where you could simulate a giant display and put windows off the edge and just navigate over to it or zoom out to see them all. I was later able to impliment this with third party addons.

I took everything I learned and imagined what someone new to the OS might experience.

I designed a new feature, the window sill, that went around the screen and windows alike and could contain anything from buttons to sliders to fields, and in this one they dynamicly floated around to maintain visibility as best they could as they were covered by other windows. I removed the touch screen controller to navigate the infinite desktop as you could just use your mouse.

Windows 11 was announced and they made each part disjointed experiences. So again I couldnt help myself I made the taskbar the everything bar, and app itself that could scale up to expose more at once, from shortcuts to scaled down apps, to controls, to messages...

Then I combined what I learned from my mobile and desktop designs.

Video

Youtube

Youtube has always been lopsided, but what if it weren't?

What if there werent buttons all over the video but who had a place set asside for them? What if there weren't shouting comment sections but conversation sections with heirarchy and depth?

What if videos in the list could all play right there in the list without taking you to another page? This one, "playable in place," finally got implimented in a more recent update!

What if everything, every service funneled all their content through one UI? Youtube, Netflix, Tiktok, everything.

What if the list just scaled content rather than "opening" it?

Game

Nintendo Power

Right when the Switch came out I had to try it because I love the idea of modularity, but it was so poorly executed I had to draw an alternative for them. The interface is as easy to use as the PS3's T UI. A couple years later they came out with a similar device the Switch Lite.

No Man's Sky

Inventory management isn't fun to me but No Mans Sky needs an overhaul.

I tried to design solutions to this.

Here's my second attempt.

RecRoom Metaverse

With x10 Quest2s and a crew, I've been stress testing one specific metaverse candidate.

First thing I tried is modeling my family's house to 1 to 1 scale with the real world so teleporting and thumbsticks arent' needed. This was trippy, the most emersive experience in VR.

Next, with derby cars, ramps, basketball courts, paintball guns, trampolene beds, I turned that house into a playground for my family to enjoy. Because of how permissions work(all or nothing) it is very easy for any collaborators to destroy the house so as we built together the hole house would disapear over and over.

Next I pushed the limits of the engine by developing a terrain tool. Unfortunatly a collision bug kept this being usable as a traversable landscape.

Now I'm working on bringing my favorite game to VR multiplayer "A Short Hike"

As this news got out the developer sent me the map models for perfect reference!

Lets rank how close RecRoom

completes CoOS principles

Tools ★★☆☆☆

Shape Tools ★★☆☆☆

Unfortunatly the tools are comparable to Secondlife but with less features; just primitive shape placing, 3 axis scaling, and hand drawn tubes. No surface editing, custom materials, and only 1 level of groups. Comparing this with CAD software, its almost useless. The best rooms like Recrally, and Recroyal are created with tools outside RecRoom; Maya, Unity, and C#, including models, terrain, shaders and interactivity coding. Everything made in-game is one step above Minecraft.

MOD tools ★★★★☆

Thankfully they have visual programming, and animation, though the abstraction may not be appropriate.

Space ★★★☆☆

Seemless Space ★★☆☆☆

Recroom is divided into Rooms, individual instanced universes that you must teleport to. Fortunatly a workaround is putting triggers at the edge of one room to teleport you to a virtually adjacent room automatically.

Limitless Space ★☆☆☆☆

Creation is limited by Ink, an artifical limit to keep your device from exploding. More intention constraints, aggressive LODing, asset streaming, and game streaming would elimitate this limit.

Shared Space ★★★★☆

Recroom gets a high rank since all experiences can be shared, the only exception is paywalls on some objects.

Interface ★★☆☆☆

Concise interface ★☆☆☆☆

Recroom has the opposite of a concise interface with a new interface to learn for every 10 buttons.

Here's my early attempt to consolidate all these into one interface.

Elegant interface ★★★★☆

There are some solid Card Designs here.

Empathetic interface ★★☆☆☆

These interfaces are usually legible at the cost of seeing more at a glance.

Forgiving interface ★★☆☆☆

While you can undo, you can't surf through the history of each object only the whole world. Plus there is no autosave, just a manual world save.

Humble interface ★★☆☆☆

There are no customizable interfaces.

Intuitive interface ★★☆☆☆

Can you find what you need when you need it? There is no feature search, and little logical structure to the location of features. Most likely you will need to google the location of a feature in a browser.

Last Thoughts

I'm excited to see Recroom and other developers are trying to build the metaverse on purpose. This is early access when compared with the ideal, so we greatfully celebrate the developers hard work, recognize the intense challenge, and patiently share principles as we hope for a virtual paradise.

Design

Autodesk Inventor

I use this software daily and popups constantly get in the way. I designed a tool feed that works like a notification feed.

Blender

Blender 2.7 was notoriously in need of in interface overhaul, so I tried.

Soft, dark, professional, clean. New outliner design, icons, and window management.

Then Blender 2.8 implimented many of these designs!

So then I took it to the next level consolidating all the various interfaces into a single everything window.

Here's my concept design for the Blender 2.8 3d Manipulator, as I found the placeholder widget... in desperate need :)

The elegant 3d model in the center quickly tells the artist what angle they have. The shortcuts can be set by clicking the menu button in the top right. A better replacement has finally been implimented in the latest version of Blender.

You of course have your hotkeys profile set up as your default, but if you hit almost any key or mouse button while hovering over a tool button or menu option, you have temporarily assigned that key to that tool, until you hit escape. This way you can load up a handful of keys for quick switching for a particular task. Blender and your keyboard/mouse would then become a palette for Modeling Sculpting and Painting.

New Apps

Yearn

What if there was a AirBNB for toys and education. Learn from your neighbors, or use their VR, RC, PC, or 3D Printers and knit a tighter community.

Hive is just an earlier version of the same idea.

Internet

Google

While google often works hard on interface design, they struggle with the last 10%. Here I implemented that final elegant touch. Instead of switching from page to page, all of the internet here would scroll and stretch before you.

Chrome

Correcting Chrome's Interface Fails; mostly just a matter of alignment and elegance to minimize the load on our brain so we can focus on our purpose.

Let's impliment these tabs full scale and while we're at it who needs a seprate search bar when the tab will do.

Scale it down and pack it with features.

When everything is tabs, there is room for more. More tabs!

Safari's finally applied CoOS interface principles.

They combined the address bar and tabs using ui cards.

This time I focused on integrating the websites into the browser,

and hiding (still functional) buttons to make more room for content.

Login

What if you are logically only shown what you need to login?

Click "Email?", and type your email.

If it is not recognized you type a new password to create an account.

If it is recognized you can type your password to login.

Social

Equalmoji

Emojis aren't the most professional expression nor are they full expressive or customizable. I designed this interface to add your own expression by bending this equal sign into a face on the fly.

Better yet a camera could automaticlly hanl the nuance per word as you type!

QUORA

Quora is a Q&A with a power hungry moderator staff. When I get frustrated I design a better world. This day I designed a chunky font and just went ahead and remade the website as a background for it.

REDDIT

Today to relax I designed a font. I was going to redesign the whole reddit website too but that very day they released an interface update that solved a lot of the ugliness so I let it be.

Discord

Discord wants to be a fullsceen app, so I redesigned it to be scalible and elegant.

Outlook

Outlook.com redesigned their website and crippled it so badly I had to move to Gmail. As a parting gift I made them an alternative to rethink their life choices.

Progressivly filter all your emails seemlessly.

Presentation

Pro Presenter

This work in progress is a real challenge. I use this software every week and all the elements need to be intentional available and predictable simultaneously.