Feb, 2024

Successful interface innovation has always tended towards making action-taking more intuitive to our ape brain instincts (in the design community, this is called direct manipulation).

The more intuitive, less energy it takes for us to understand syntax, and the more energy we can put to actual thinking- probably the main reason we still use pen+paper / marker+whiteboards regularly.

Milestones of computing interface innovation:

• Electrical circuitry (0D - no direct way of interacting with the computer)
• → punchcards (1D string of binary (indirect representation of text))
• → command line interface (1D string of directly readable text)
• → GUI (2D screen with mouse pointer - an indirect representation of pointing)
• → touch screen (2D screen with directly manipulatable graphics)

Each milestone led to multiple orders of magnitude increase in multiple dimensions:

• reduction in the time it takes for someone to upskill on the interface (weeks of training => a 2yo can use an ipad)
• in the number of computer users
• in the amount of digital content produced

Vision Pro is a big deal because its the first time intuition is taken to all three dimensions. And Apple has done a damn good job of making the thing intuitive.

From a market perspective, there are a tonne of reasons to be pessimistic. But the upside is huge given the above and I’m optimistic that there’s insane potential.

Market growth for new platforms is usually defined by the number of creators in the space (the reason why MS and Apple invest so heavily in the dev ecosystems). I’m expecting this to grow a lot over coming years as the third dimension of interfaces gets unlocked with already 200K headsets sold.