A 3D operating system without apps

Freeing our digital stuff from the "app trap"!

Firstly, welcome to all my new subscribers! It’s great to have you along with me on this research journey. Hopefully I’ll get you thinking; some of you enough to drop your thoughts into a comment below, and have a conversation with me about all of these ideas…

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This Object Network “Lab Note” kicks off the discussion with the question:

Why do we even need applications or apps?

Humans have evolved in the 3D physical world, along with language and, more recently, 2D pictures and writing. We never had programs, applications or apps until the middle of the last century.

So maybe this is an example of computers - or their techie masters - insisting that humans do things their way instead of computers being designed to better fit in with how we humans live and think?

There are ways to design computer systems that do work more like reality. The clue is in their names of course: “virtual reality” and “augmented reality” (VR and AR). Even a 3D game or virtual world is primarily a simulation of a reality-inspired environment.

So we could start there, and imagine what it would feel like to work within a 3D operating system without apps!

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A 3D operating system without apps

Without apps, what’s left? Well, there’s all of that digital stuff that they managed.

Our photos, documents, spreadsheets, emails, calendars, contacts, to-do lists, notes, messages, videos, music, workout plans, sleep records, game characters and scores, playlists, alarms, travel itineraries, map pins, news feeds, phone call history, texts, etc, etc.

You’d have to fire up around 20 apps to access all that. And none of this stuff joins up, it’s all jealously guarded and sealed off by its respective app.

Without apps, all of this rich diversity of digital content is freed up for us to play with, just like we do in the real 3D world.

In the real world, especially the world before computers, you could, for example, tape a to-do list onto a calendar. You could put a CD onto the table to remind you to take it to listen in the car. You could use an old CD to make a coaster! You could put a contact number on a slip of paper inside the map you’d use to get there. Your clock was in the bedroom where it was needed. You would frame your favourite photos on the wall, and pin messages to the family on the fridge where they’d be seen when they were needed. You could go in the living room and take a book off the shelf, and find in it a bookmark that you scribbled some notes onto.

In our 3D operating system, all of this is possible again, without apps getting in the way; all of our digital stuff can be “mashed up”, reused and repurposed and organised freely any way we like. We can once again cut out a paragraph from a magazine article and pin it to the bedroom mirror. Only this time it’s a virtual paragraph attached to a mirror in a virtual house, or maybe an augmented reality paragraph pinned to a physical mirror in your real house.

At this point, it’s worth noting that we’re being futurists here, in the sense that VR and AR technology isn’t quite ready yet. We need to be wearing glasses that look and feel like ordinary spectacles or even contact lenses, for this to be a seamless and unintrusive experience. But we can still have a 3D operating system today, with all of this on our mobile and PC screens, but also working on the bulkier VR and AR headsets that are available now.

You could mix virtual and real rooms and environments to provide the keys and hooks to place things. It may make sense to have calendars and to-do lists easily available when in the kitchen and alarms when in the bedroom. Or create an entire virtual gallery for all your family photos that you can tour with others. But then why not key that whole virtual experience into the living room, so that you can start your gallery visit easily when relaxing there? Obviously you’d want to be able to look at the smart lamp when in that living room to see its virtual or augmented control panel.

If you wanted to create a document with a photo in it, you could type the text, using either a real or virtual keyboard, then just drop it on the floor while you go to the stairs and grab a photo from the wall there, walk back, pick up the document and drop the photo in the middle. It would resize appropriately for the document size, of course.

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Links

While describing all this mashing and mingling of digital stuff, I’ve used words such as “pin”, “drop”, “grab”, “key”, “hook”. This freeing of all our digital stuff from the “app trap” has led directly to a very important and powerful concept that we need to formalise.

In the next article, I’ll be discussing the Power of the Link! Links are the foundational concept for the Object Network and the operating system that we’re imagining here.

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What do you think? Drop your thoughts into the comments below. And I’ll see you in the next Lab Note!