Thread by @softspaceninja

SoftspaceAR Prototype03 is out!

This prototype is all about making Softspace deeply interoperable with the rest of your workflow.

Let’s talk about why spatial canvases are awesome, but also painful, and how we maybe fixed this 🪡👇🏼

#vr #xr #metaquest2 #tft #buildinginpublic

Having a spatial canvas to organize your ideas on is amazing, but spatial layouts can be hard or impossible to translate to the other formats and devices in your workflow.

And if the work you do in an app gets stuck there, you’re (justifiably) not going to use it very much.

With Prototype03, I wanted to figure out how Softspace might overcome this problem without simply becoming a VR version of an existing 2D app. Could we keep that immersive spatial magic, while reading from and writing to a file format that’s highly portable?

Like markdown?

Making Softspace workspaces interpretable as markdown files—and vice versa—would open up super exciting ways to fit Softspace into knowledge workflows. For example:

💡You could throw research notes and images into a Dropbox folder, use Softspace to synthesize them into a project proposal, and then directly email that proposal to your team.

💡 You could work on your Roam/Notion/Obsidian/LogSeq/Athens/etc. personal knowledge repository in Softspace.

💡 You could start brainstorming for a Substack post in Softspace, then continue editing the post on your phone while riding the subway 😉.

All this sounds great! But there’s a catch.

Markdown, like all text formats, is inherently ordinal.

Softspace, running in augmented reality, is inherently spatial.

Ordinality requires that each element have a definite place in a linear sequence, but highly spatial layouts want to break free of such constraints.

Prototype03 reconciles these demands with a 3D layout system that is strictly ordinal, while letting you move a text block in any of the three spatial dimensions.

Videos are better than words here 👇🏼

Content (which are text blocks only, for now) flows down columns; columns spread horizontally across a plane; and planes stack front-to-back.

This system lets you move things along the x-, y-, and z-axes, but always results in a spatial configuration that is unambiguously interpretable—both by machines and people—as a definite sequence of elements.

There’s some “give” in the positioning of elements in the x- and z-axes, which lets you place things closer together or further apart. Physical distance is an important way of expressing relations between ideas in spatial layouts.

And of course: as you build up the workspace in Prototype03, it automatically writes your work to a markdown file!

The criterion of success for this prototype was to develop a 3D layout system that was 1) strictly ordinal, yet 2) meaningfully spatial.

How’d we do?

✅ Prototype03’s layout system is strictly ordinal. This allows it to write out a markdown file representing any possible workspace you create in it.

❓ Spatiality is a spectrum. The layout system is less spatial than a purely Cartesian one, but it still allows for relatively free placement of elements. Does this mediated spatiality convey enough of the benefits of the medium to justify working in a headset? You tell me.

Ideas for future builds:

• Mapping breaks in the x, y, and z axes to H3, H2, and H1 headings
• Using Dropbox as backend
• Image support
• Browser support
• Tag / wikilink support

Words and images can only convey so much of how any 3D UI works and feels. Try Prototype03 for yourself, and read the deep dive, here: substack.soft.space/p/softspacear-…