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Not OP but the team at Leap Motion [1] has some very interesting demos. 3D UI's re-imagined from the ground up. Weirdly, because now everything is 3D, the best you can do is try to mimic actually 3D things perhaps, something that didn't work in 2D at all?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m6J8W6Ib4w

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dB1IRg3Qls



They're fun demos. And perhaps from the perspective of say mobile, they're kind of reasonable. Rotating your wrist? Waving your arm to press a button? Waving your arm to move a window? Not all that odd when holding a phone.

But from the perspective of laptops/desktops? What comes to my mind is: RSI; slowwwww, but maybe it's the touchpad version of a standing desk?; people use tiling window managers in part because waving a finger to place windows in 2D is already too burdensome.

I've just now failed again to find nice video, but if you've ever seen it, picture a professional artist tooling along on a Cintiq at insane speed. Stylus, and two handed multitouch flying. Zipping through enormous menus. Twitch gesturing through radial menus. Stylus input with pressure and tilt and rotation. Now imagine that interactive area was several centimeters high. And imagine transparent layers of content above the screen (you might sort of get a feel, by moving a semi-transparent window in front of another, and switch between reading one and the other, back and forth). Imagine a 3D visual environment extending below and above the screen. And around it, throughout the room. Now imagine your keyboard does multitouch, and instead of art, that's your code.




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