Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm)
We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.
It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.
> It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did
I think this is where AI could be put to work. Before, what would be a toilsome digital clean up process (eg git commits) is now an instruction to an LLM to clean it up. If the chaos was clean-up-able, would your product have worked?
this stuff was huge for a while, 20-25 years ago, digital libraries, information exploration, ... consider even things like minority report, or more prosaically, all the demos coming out of MIT medialab.
It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.
Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.
I am too lazy to do the work but in that time frame I considered that a zooming/hierarchical view would be a nice way to browse the web, with followed links appearing as new pages next to the current page. The web became too dynamic for that anyway.
I think (work)spaces like macOS Spaces because they make access easier; with a single continuous space you have to work, whereas a workspace is a hotkey away. They make for nice demos and movie scenes though.
After having used such things since the 80s (starting with DESQview) I find myself simply minimizing or leaving secondary applications in the background of a single workspace. When I do use other spaces it is for full screen view. I don't usually need to see multiple windows at the same time, but that would be a task for a tiling manager...
Very cool interface and reminiscent of figma/excalidraw in the way they provide an infinite 2d canvas for shapes and figures. Most tools of these types tend to implement layers as well, which might be loosely analogous to multiple desktops and could be a neat interface element to explore. The impetus for layering in a drawing tool is very different from the impetus for doing such in a desktop windowing tool.
The 3d demos are similar to what you experience when using a VR headset with desktop emulation software. I ran experiments with that for several months and while the concepts were interesting, context switching in a simulated physical space was actually a lot slower than alt+tabbing between things.
FYI those Firefox containers have little to nothing to do with organizing tabs spatially, it just lets you have different 'profiles' to open tabs in that can all have separate cookies and so lets you be logged into different accounts on the same website for one example/use case.
It's basically already been said but, this seems absurd. I'm not quite sure what TRUE benefit you'd get from this but it seems more frustrating than it's worth. I can't figure out a reason to do this unless I'm just in the mood to piss myself off.
I've found that working in a style similar to this is very useful for managing multiple threads of work at the same time.
I use virtual desktops, where each desktop contains a single thing that I am working on, and everything related to it. Then any good window manager can switch between them quickly and even give you a spatial sense of where you are. I organize them as a priority stack, so the topmost priority is in top position and then it goes downward from there
There's a lot that this "campus" product does that isn't present in such a set up (multi user, zooming, etc...) but virtual desktops give you a lot of the benefit and come built in to most of our operating systems
Has anyone seen efforts to replace manual spatial layout with a more dynamic AI-delegated personal-assistant-ish "I know what you're currently up to, so here's a screens/workspaces/windows layout for that, arranged in a way I know you'll like"?
What I like about Niri and hyprland is that I don't need to think about where windows open and about positioning them. This then looks very tiring, but I could be wrong. Would have to play with it.
I kinda already have this with Niri's infinite-scrolling horizontal strip and Vicinae as the control plane for complex stuff. like, to replace my Niri setup I'd need a 48:9 (!) monitor
We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.
It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.
I think this is where AI could be put to work. Before, what would be a toilsome digital clean up process (eg git commits) is now an instruction to an LLM to clean it up. If the chaos was clean-up-able, would your product have worked?
They mostly do not gain a lot of users. Good luck!
It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.
Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.
If I recall correctly, it became popular because of the Lawnmower Man movie in '92.
After having used such things since the 80s (starting with DESQview) I find myself simply minimizing or leaving secondary applications in the background of a single workspace. When I do use other spaces it is for full screen view. I don't usually need to see multiple windows at the same time, but that would be a task for a tiling manager...
The 3d demos are similar to what you experience when using a VR headset with desktop emulation software. I ran experiments with that for several months and while the concepts were interesting, context switching in a simulated physical space was actually a lot slower than alt+tabbing between things.
Answer: you get a mess.
That's why browsers weren't built like that, and also why I think this will not work.
But happy to be proven wrong of course.
> Answer: you get a mess.
> That's why browsers weren't built like that
But people frequently go out of their way to put their tabs into two dimensions.
There are tab trees: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabtree/afejdkkhibi...
There are tab groups: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups
There are tab containers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
It seems pretty clear that people want their tabs to be organized in multiple dimensions.
I use virtual desktops, where each desktop contains a single thing that I am working on, and everything related to it. Then any good window manager can switch between them quickly and even give you a spatial sense of where you are. I organize them as a priority stack, so the topmost priority is in top position and then it goes downward from there
There's a lot that this "campus" product does that isn't present in such a set up (multi user, zooming, etc...) but virtual desktops give you a lot of the benefit and come built in to most of our operating systems