Spatial Computing with links not apps (briefly)
My wife said it was too long, so here's the short version
If you haven’t read the longer version yet, then you’re in luck! This one is shorter.
“Spatial Computing”, as presented by Apple in their Vision Pro XR headset and corresponding VisionOS operating system, misses an opportunity to re-imagine what an operating system could be like now that we have a full 3D space to work within.
In Apple’s offering, you still have applications and the familiar “desktop”, but they now float in front of you at a much larger scale. It’s still holding on to what is now quite an ancient desktop-and-applications model of computer interfaces.
But, as I discussed in “Apps considered harmful”, I believe that we’d be better off without apps, or applications, all together!
This article is a shorter version of Spatial Computing with links not apps. It quickly runs through what a Spatial Computing OS without apps could look like.
Firstly, even if you do chuck all the apps, you’d still be left with all their files…
Deconstructing the filesystem
Now, in conventional operating systems you have local files found through filenames and folder collections. You would see them in a file explorer app.
But without any apps, we can’t see files that way any more.
Files themselves have contents, such as the paragraphs of a document, hidden away inside their different types, that we aren’t expected to see or change directly. The corresponding app used to let us do all that.
But without any apps, we can’t see inside files that way any more.
Folders, files and all the hidden bits inside files were great for apps, but are boundaries that we no longer need in our app-free Spatial Computing OS. We don't need our digital stuff in these strict rigid folder hierarchies, or locked away inside inscrutable file formats.
So, let’s just pull out all the interesting bits from within those files: all the paragraphs, images, contact info, geo-locations, media, lists, to-dos, events, etc.
We can then just scatter them around inside our 3D Spatial space!
I call all of these bits of digital property objects, and we use links to sew them all back up together - how we like, not how they like!
A parallel reality
In this version of “Spatial Computing”, you would be surrounded in the AR or VR space with all of this digital property:
Experienced through AR or VR, this would essentially be a “parallel digital reality”.
Here, things will just work like they already do in physical reality:
Just as in the real world, you would be able to paperclip a friend’s contact info to a date on the calendar that’s hanging on your virtual wall, next to a pinboard covered in photos and notes. You could create a 3D gallery for your photos, with rooms for each type or category, and then wander around it when you liked.
This is a space that respects our intuitions from reality about how things work together.
A shared parallel reality
But it’s missing something: other people!
We need to create a shared parallel reality so we can meet others and see their digital property, too. We need a way to join our Spatial spaces into one.
In a single shared space, this operating system will show you all of your own digital stuff on your own device, intermingled with the shared, live digital stuff of everyone else, including their avatars. The digital stuff in this shared reality will include both 2D, with text and images, and 3D places, property and people.
It’ll be much better than apps:
Instead of a chat app, you’ll just meet and chat
Instead of a game app, you’ll just visit a place where people play that game
But how can we safely join our spaces together like this, over the internet? We’d very much like this shared digital reality to be open. We don’t want it to be owned just by Apple, or “Meta”, who would ship all of our data to their servers…
Open like the Web: URLs
The best way to keep everything open is to be like the Web.
The Web is built on a simple and powerful technology - the URL:
A URL is simply the unique ID of a chunk of digital content, that is being used to refer to it, perhaps from within another chunk.
URLs drive the Web’s openness; they empower anyone to contribute to the global Web, with commodity software running on their own servers.
We want the same openness, simplicity and power for our Spatial Computing operating system's shared parallel digital reality. So we need to use URLs to implement the sharing in this world between all running instances of our OS.
We could simply have URLs - or links - to and between each other’s digital property, right on our own devices - with a permissioning system!
Links: seamless and direct
Links will give us shareable handles on all of our digital property. We can use links to sew it all together however we like, to build a single, shared parallel reality.
Everything from single paragraphs up to entire libraries, everything from a leaf to a forest, can be ID’d and can be linked and structured together to build our Spatial operating system’s shared reality. We can use these links for the smallest of world objects, so this space will be a completely seamless experience for all of us. Even our avatars have IDs, of course, and can thus be linked to!
Instead of juggling apps, we’d work primarily with these pervasive links between all of our digital property.
I could make a contact card on my device, then wander virtually over to a room hosted on yours and “walk” up to a calendar on the wall there, then pin that card onto an event as an RSVP. The event would then update its number of attendees.
We’ll all be interacting together within this parallel reality, manifest by all instances of our Spatial Computing OS working together, running on all of our devices across the planet.
These links could either point literally directly between our devices over the internet, or be set up via intermediary servers we trust to host our digital property.
Anything you link to is live, of course: you can watch it change.
Experiencing the space
The picture below illustrates some basic elements of your experience using this operating system: there’s a room you’ve built from linked wall and floor panels, which could be a co-creation space between a number of people. There are relevant 2D objects attached by links to the walls, plus some objects have been pulled out aside to float in front of you, or have been scattered on the floor.
At the bottom of the screen is a place for you to collect links to things for use in any further context. Some objects appear twice or more: they look identical because they are the same object, so if such an object changes, it changes everywhere that it’s linked to.
Re-imagining Apple’s Spatial Computing
It’s time to consider retiring the old desktop metaphor still used in Apple’s Spatial Computing OS, where we have to juggle multiple applications.
Instead, imagine an app-free Spatial Computing OS, one where we can all meet together within a single, open “parallel digital reality” - a 3D co-creation and thinking space - manifest by all instances of this OS on devices across the planet - built from pervasive links between all of our shared digital property.
Note that I’ve been calling this operating system “OnexOS” in other articles. As this is a research project, all names are subject to change!
Subscribe right here to keep up-to-date with this project: