The first is content consumption. Headsets are great for watching movies because of the unparalleled immersion they provide from the comfort of your home or airplane seat. There’s a rough consensus that this is a use case the Vision Pro already does very, very well.

The second is getting work done. People are hoping the headset can make them more productive. But this use case isn’t completely ready for prime time. From lack of software, to battery life, to comfort, there are many reasons why we aren’t living Apple’s spatial computing utopia yet.

What would it take to get us there?

Well, one of things we need to solve is typing.

Keyboards are flat, but headsets are not

Apple and Meta are both trying to position spatial computing as the next major computing paradigm. For this to succeed, people need to be able to use headsets to do real work. To do real work, you need a real keyboard.

Unfortunately, headsets and keyboards literally don’t go together: keyboards are flat, but headsets aren’t. Geometry makes it impossible to neatly couple them. The two really want to be separate objects.

Consequently, aspiring spatial computing devotees can’t count on always having a keyboard with their headset. Even if you invest in a dedicated keyboard, it’s easy to forget to bring it along, because there’s no elegant way to physical attach it to the headset.

(This is not the case for other portable computing devices, because their displays are flat. This flatness makes it possible to mate them with a keyboard, or to display one onscreen.)

Real work needs real keyboards

History strongly suggests that general-purpose computing requires a physical keyboard.

Looking at the broad arc of the two foundational computer input methods—pointing and typing—it’s notable that one is becoming more ephemeral, whereas the other is not.

Pointers have gone from chunky wired mice with two buttons → to svelte wireless mice with once button → to smooth trackpads that are all button → to the Vision Pro's nearly-telepathic eye tracking.

Keyboards, on the other hand, did get thinner and sleeker over the decades. But then they hit a plateau, and attempts at taking them past a certain level of immateriality (butterfly keys, touch bars) have been met with loud user resistance.

If anything, keyboards are rematerializing. Observe the return of physical function keys in the MacBook series, or the increasing popularity of premium mechanical keyboards.

Typing defies ephemeralization

Neither virtual keyboards nor speech-to-text are substitutes for the real thing.

Once the novelty of typing on a levitating virtual keyboard wears off (which takes about three seconds), using a virtual keyboard to write anything longer than monosyllabic words makes you want to throw something heavy out a window.

Even Apple's implementation is frustrating to use, which means virtual keyboards aren’t something a couple billion more billion dollars can easily solve.

There have been some interesting experiments out of Meta's Reality Labs around virtual keyboards which are mapped to a physical surface, like a desk. The fact they are boasting such impressive WPM numbers but haven’t shipped it yet suggests there’s some fatal flaw to this approach.

AI speech-to-text models like Whisper have gotten stunningly good. We use Whisper 3 to power Softspace’s speech-to-text button. But speech-to-text is only really good for the initial inputting of text. It’s not good for fine editing of text, which is just as important when doing real work.

Also, there are just too many moments in one’s day when speaking the text you want to input, out loud, would be awkward or inconsiderate or otherwise undesirable.

There’s a solution in front of you

If real work needs a keyboard, but headsets can’t come with one, is general-purpose spatial computing doomed?

Not if spatial computing doesn’t completely displace legacy computing devices in the near-term, but complements them instead.

Early reports indicate that people really love using their Vision Pro as an external display for their MacBooks. The most obvious advantage to this setup, compared to using a visionOS app, is that all your programs and data are already there.

But an under-appreciated reason why this feels so good is that you’re using an industry-leading trackpad and keyboard with the headset.

Apple has taken the logical next step of allowing your laptop’s keyboard to input text not only within the virtual display of the MacBook, but also in native visionOS apps.

Unfortunately, Meta’s Quest doesn’t have the system-level ability to do this. Users who want to use a physical keyboard with their Quest have to pair a dedicated Bluetooth keyboard.

Unless they’re using Softspace.

We built a web keyboard for Softspace

Using Softspace with a physical keyboard is a far superior experience to using it without. Even if you’re browsing the web and not writing lot of text, this is true.

But we know from the metrics that only a small minority of users ever use the app with a Bluetooth keyboard. We understand why: dedicating a keyboard to the headset is a big hassle, especially if it’s only for a single app.

So we built a way for users to use a keyboard on any other (internet-connected) device inside Softspace, via a web app that conveys keystrokes to the Quest.

Here’s how it works: in Softspace, you generate a keyboard pairing code. On your laptop (or tablet, or even phone), you go to keyboard.soft.space and enter this code. For additional security, a second confirmation code is displayed in the headset, which you input into the keyboard web app.

Once that’s done, you can just start typing in Softspace using your laptop.

If the headset and laptop are on the same local network, the latency is slightly noticeable but not problematic. This setup even works with the devices are on different networks, but the latency becomes more noticeable. We’ve never experienced latency so bad that it made the web keyboard unusable.

If you have the chance to give this feature a try, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Oh, and Meta, if you’re reading this: it would be great if you implemented a system-level version of this so other apps can overcome spatial computing’s keyboard problem too 😉.

Softspace has launched on the Meta Quest Store.

This is the first moment that all 20+ million Quest owners can install Softspace onto their device with a single click, for free.

In fact, you can get it here →

This moment has been a long time coming.

Our mission is to harness the power of spatial computing to make you smarter and more creative. Getting Softspace into the hands of many more users will help us move more quickly toward that goal.

The launch version of Softspace has many features you’ve already seen in the Alpha, but also a couple of new tricks up its sleeve. Here are some of the highlights:

AI-powered features for insight and inspiration

You can now ask the AI a question or a send a prompt to quickly add text to your workspace. We’ve found that this can significantly speed up workflows like brainstorming or mind mapping.

When you switch into Free workspace mode, Softspace will use AI to suggest topics that are important and related to existing content.

Also in the Free workspace mode, items will cluster together based on their AI-generated semantic similarities.

Command Prompt for faster item creation

Reducing friction while using Softspace is one of our top design goals.

To help you add content quickly and easily, we’ve built a Command Prompt that appears when you press the space bar. From here, you can quickly create new items, browse the web, or ask the AI.

Layout Mode with snapping and alignment

The new default view for the workspace is the Layout mode.

In this mode, you can place items freely in space, but when they get close to each other, they will snap to the same plane, and avoid overlapping each other.

These behaviors help you quickly create layouts that look good and are rich in spatial meaning.

This is just a taste of what the new Softspace offers. Experience it for yourself, and let us know how we can make it better!

Get Softspace for free →

Read the User Guide →

Join the Discord →

Finally: a big, big “thank you” to our community of Substack subscribers, Twitter followers, and (most of all) test users and early customers. We couldn’t have gotten here without you.

Until next time,

Yiliu + the Softspace team

P.S. If you ever paid for a previous version of Softspace, watch out for an email with a code that will get you a lifetime Softspace Personal plan unlock for free :)

I’ve got some really exciting news: Softspace Alpha is live on App Lab!

That means you can go to our listing on the Quest Store and start testing it right now →

Softspace on App Lab

We’ve also created a new website called Softspace Docs, where we will publish guides, releas notes, and other handy information for Softspace users →

Softspace Docs

We’re reposting the User Guide below, to give you a sense of how the Alpha works.

Thanks so much for your continued support,

— Yiliu

Welcome!

Softspace is an AR project space where designers and researchers can organize, develop, and explore their ideas in a powerful new way: immersively, in 3D.

Spatial computing holds much promise, but it’s still early days for this paradigm. The version of Softspace you’re about to use is an experimental Alpha.

Thank you for your patience as we invent, together, the future of collaborative creative knowledge work.

Let’s get started.

Setting Up

Headset

Softspace runs on the Quest family of mixed-reality devices.

The best user experience is on the Quest Pro because of its superior optics, chipset, sensors, and ergonomics.

However, we’ve also optimized Softspace to run well on the Quest 2, as this is by far the most commonly-owned headset.

We technically support the original Quest. However, we do not recommend using it, due to its limited performance and poor visual quality.

Input

For full functionality, Softspace needs input from two sources: your hands, and a keyboard.

Hand input can either come from the Quest controllers, or from hand tracking. We strongly recommend using hand tracking, because putting down the controllers to type on a keyboard adds a lot of friction to your workflow.

We’ve tried all manner of virtual keyboards, and the simple truth is that nothing comes close to the precision, familiarity, and speed of typing on a physical keyboard. Therefore, we have designed Softspace to be used with an attached Bluetooth or USB keyboard for text input.

Before running Softspace, please:

✅ Enable hand-tracking on your device

✅ Connect a Bluetooth or USB keyboard

Interactions

We’ve worked hard to make the interaction model in Softspace as simple as possible, but no simpler. There are two major kinds of interactions: locomotion (which move the entire workspace relative to you), and manipulation (which move specific elements within the workspace).

Locomotion

Locomotion refers to your movement relative to the entire virtual workspace.

Most obviously, you can walk around your physical space to view the workspace from different points-of-view.

You can also use a hand interaction called gripping to move the workspace without having to move yourself.

To grip the workspace, make a fist with one hand, then move your hand around. You can also grip the workspace with two hands to rotate and scale it.

Manipulation

Manipulation refers to moving individual items within the workspace.

To manipulate an item, raise your hand and touch the item with the cursor that hovers between your thumb and index finger. Tap your thumb and index fingers together to “click” an item, or hold them together to “drag” an item.

Palm Menu

If you hold up your hand and look at your palm, a menu appears. You can press the buttons in this menu using the tip of the index finger of the other hand.

Workspaces

Contents in Softspace are organized into workspaces.

Managing Workspaces

To create, delete, edit, or open a workspace, press the workspaces button on the palm menu. This opens the Workspaces UI, where you can manage your workspaces.

🚧 In the App Lab Alpha, workspace data is store locally on-device. This means that your data is secure against external access. However, if you delete a workspace or the Softspace app, it will not be possible to recover workspace data.

For now, only one workspace can be opened at a time.

Workspace View Modes

A workspace can be in one of two view modes.

To switch between the modes, click on the icon to the right of the workspace title.

Items

The individual contents of each workspace are called Items.

There are different types of items, which roughly correspond to different file types that are common across most productivity tools.

So far, three types of items have been implemented:

• Text Items

• Image Items

• Topic Items

We are working on implementing others, such as PDFs and bookmarked websites.

Text

Text Items correspond most closely to single paragraphs within a text document, or single text blocks within block-based tools like Notion.

Editing Text

To edit a text item, hover over it with one of your cursors, and tap your thumb and index fingers together to “click” on it. Then use your attached keyboard to type.

While you are editing a text item, you can use the cursor to jump to other parts of the text, or click-and-drag to select parts of the text.

Creating Text

To create a new text item, press the Return key while typing at the end of another text item.

🚧 For now, the only way to create new text items is by hitting the Return key while typing at the end of another text item. We are designing an interaction for creating new text items directly.

Deleting Text

Pressing Backspace while typing on an empty text item will delete it from the workspace.

Images

Image Items correspond to image files, such as JPG and PNG.

Importing Images

Image items are not created within Softspace. Instead, they are imported, e.g. using the web browser or via the Dropbox importer (more below).

Supported Formats

Softspace currently supports the following image formats:

• JPG

• PNG

• GIF (not animated)

• BMP

• TIF

• PSD

Deleting Images

To delete an image, first select it by clicking on it with a cursor. A blue frame will appear about the selected image. Press the Backspace key to delete the image from your workspace.

Topics

Topic Items are the primary container for organizing contents within a workspace. They correspond roughly to the notes or pages in a tool like Notion.

Creating Topics

Topic items are created via reference from one or more text items. To create a topic, surround any word or phrase inside a text item with double square brackets, like this:

[[Topic items]] in [[Softspace]] are created by reference from within [[text items]].

A text item with the above contents would result in the topics “Topic Items”, “Softspace”, and “Text Items” being created within the currently opened workspace.

🚧 For now, the only way to create new topic items is via reference from a text item. We are designing an interaction for creating new topic items directly.

🚧 For now, it is not possible to edit the title of a topic. If you edit the text inside the double-square brackets in a text item, a new reference is create to a new topic item with the updated text.

Topic View Modes

A workspace can be in one of two view modes.

To switch between these view modes, click on the icon to the right of the topic title. Note that this icon is only enabled when the entire workspace is in Linked view.

(Un)Containing Items

When a topic is in Stacked View mode, other (non-topic) items can be contained in them. To add an item to a topic, grab the item and “push” it into the topic item’s body. To remove an item, grab it and “pull” it off the topic item’s body.

Deleting Topics

A topic is automatically deleted if three conditions hold:

1. It is not referenced by any text in the workspace.

2. It does not contain any child items.

3. It is in Linked View mode.

🚧 For now, it is not possible to directly delete topics.

Web Browser

A good web browser is a core tool for any digital workflow.

We’ve implemented a desktop-class browser inside Softspace so that you can access the web from directly inside the headset, and are building custom features like image-saving to make it as useful as possible within your creative workflow.

To open the web browser, press the browser button in your palm menu.

Web Browsing

To click on web UI elements, hover over them with your hand cursor and tap your thumb and index fingers together.

To scroll web pages, press your thumb and index fingers together, then move your hand.

You can also click on the browser controls underneath the browser window, and edit the text in the URL bar in the same way you edit text items. Press Return while editing the URL bar to navigate to the typed URL or send a Google search for the typed term.

Saving Images

If you hover your cursor over an image on a website that is downloadable, a small green icon will appear next to your cursor.

To save these images into the current workspace, touch your thumb and index fingers together, and either hold for ~1 second, or pull your hand toward you. The image will be added to the workspace as a new image item.

Dropbox Integration

A key requirement for any productivity tool is the ability to easily get work in from and out to the rest of your workflow. To facilitate this, we’ve implemented a Dropbox integration.

🚧 For now, we’ve only built a Dropbox integration. We are working on supporting other cloud storage and knowledge management tools.

Importing

Open the import UI by pressing the import button on your palm menu, and select Dropbox.

If you haven’t yet authenticated your Dropbox account, you will be prompted to do so. You only have to do this once, from either the importer or exporter.

The Dropbox importer allows you to import:

• Image files in the supported formats

• Markdown files

• Folders of images and markdown

Exporting

Open the export UI by pressing the export button on your palm menu, and select Dropbox.

If you haven’t yet authenticated your Dropbox account, you will be prompted to do so. You only have to do this once, from either the importer or exporter.

Select a Dropbox folder to which you want to export the workspace.

Workspaces are exported as a collection of markdown and image files.

Getting In Touch

We’ve tried to cover most of the bases in this user guide, but it’s certainly not exhaustive.

If you have any other questions, concerns, or ideas for making Softspace better, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

💌 hi@soft.space

https://discord.com/invite/45PYYsG

We’re using an open prototyping process that lets us work from first principles and validate our ideas in the real world.

Help us invent a powerful new tool for creative thinking by signing up to this Substack 🔬, following us on Twitter 🐦, or joining the Discord 👯‍♀️.

Hi everybody!

I have some big news to share with you.

We’ve finished building a major new version of Softspace: v2022.06. This is the first version of the AR app that we intend for broader public testing and feedback.

As such: we’ve submitted it to Meta’s App Lab, where it’s currently under review. Getting on App Lab will make installing Softspace to your Quest a one-click process. It’s also a big step toward listing on the main Quest Store, which will get Softspace in front of millions of headset owners.

Since v2022.06 is such a mouthful, let’s call it the App Lab Alpha.

The Alpha incorporates many lessons we’ve learned from building and testing SoftspaceAR prototypes 01–05, as well as from years of building the VR versions of Softspace.

As the name suggests, it’s by no means finished—but I could not be more pleased with how well the ideas and mechanics from the Prototypes came together here.

The App Lab approval process takes some weeks. In the meantime, you can already register to get the Alpha as soon as we’re live, using the link below:

Register for SoftspaceAR App Lab Alpha

But I didn’t write this post to tell you to hurry up and wait 😉. Let’s take a sneak peak at what the Alpha has up its sleeve!

Sneak Peek: App Lab Alpha

Unified UI Model

One of the core questions in last year’s prototyping process was: How do we design a 3D interface that’s great for working with 2D content like notes and images?

Early VR versions of Softspace took a “Cartesian playground” approach to positioning items in the workspace. Each piece of text or image or PDF had a simple (x,y,z) coordinate that defined its position (either relative to the global workspace origin, or its parent container).

We always knew that this approach would be inadequate (hence the “playground” designation). Its primary drawback is the lack of a reliable way to sensibly order objects. Without ordinality, it’s impossible to convert 3D layouts to a format that’s compatible with the other productivity tools you use on your laptop and mobile devices.

The Prototypes experimented with ways to introduce the necessary structure and ordinality to a 3D layout system, without throwing away all the spatial magic that AR offers.

Prototype03 tested a layout system that is both ordinal and uses all three spatial dimensions. Prototype04 tested a force-directed layout system that uses semantic references to automatically generate 3D layouts.

It wasn’t obvious how (or if) these systems could be reconciled. Happily, the Alpha successfully incorporates each as a distinct view mode, and lets you switch back and forth between them at the workspace (global) level, or the topic (local) level.

Import & Export

Prototype05 introduced features that moved SoftspaceAR much closer to being a real tool for doing real creative work. However, it wasn’t quite there yet, which is why we still considered it a prototype, as opposed to a main-branch version of the app.

One of the key requirement that Prototype05 failed to meet was upstream and downstream integration with the rest of your workflow. By this, I mean the ability to bring work from your other tools into Softspace, and to take work you do in Softspace back out.

The Alpha meets this requirement by implementing import from, and export to, Dropbox. For the first, time, SoftspaceAR can slot into your existing workflows, using common file formats like markdown, jpgs, and pngs.

This import and export functionality is only possible because of the global and local ordinality that the unified UI model brings to each workspace and topic container.

Workspaces

The Alpha introduces the ability to create, open, switch between, and delete independent collections of content called Workspaces.

We’ve put a lot of thought into what the right way to organize content in Softspace should be. We’re starting here with a clear and simple model, in which the contents of each workspace are independent. For performance reasons, only one workspace can be opened at a time.

This approach leaves open the possibility for multiple workspace in the future, as well as fancier functionality like content that is transcluded across multiple workspaces.

Registration Is Open!

Although the Alpha isn’t live yet on App Lab, it’s actively being reviewed by Meta’s team, so we expect to launch it very soon.

You can already register using the link below to to get access as soon as we’re live:

Register for SoftspaceAR App Lab Alpha

As always: thanks for reading, stay well, and see you next time!

—Yiliu

SoftspaceAR Prototype05 is out!

You can get the APK here, then use the Meta Quest Developer Hub or SideQuest desktop app to install it to your Quest, Quest 2, or Quest Pro headset.

Please give it a go!

In February of this year, I started to build and release these prototypes to explore an exciting new possibility space: productivity and creativity tools designed natively for AR headsets.

In the announcement post for this project, I wrote that:

Over the coming months, we will release 5–10 prototypes to explore and (in)validate promising ways to harness augmented reality as a medium for thought…

I expect the first few prototypes to be all over the map, the next few to start converging on core underlying principles, and the last ones to build more deliberately on what came before.

And that is indeed what is happening. This, the fifth prototype in the series, is the first one that feels like it’s building more on top of its predecessors than striking out on its own into new territory. It is heavily based on Prototype04, while also drawing on key lessons from Prototype03.

This doesn't mean that the experimentation is over. There are still aspects of the SoftspaceAR UX and product story that need prototyping and validation. But I've built out enough versions, and have tested them with enough people, to have a good feel for which ideas make sense, and which probably don’t.

In addition to a wide range of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes which I will not bore you with, Prototype05 contains four major features that move SoftspaceAR toward being a real tool in which you can do real work.

These are: the web browser, images support, text item LODing, and multiple open topics.

Web Browser

Being able to access the internet is a core part of any contemporary knowledge workflow. Prototype05 implements a personal web browser to give users access to the rest of the web from within the headset. Given how many of the other tools that users rely on have web apps, this browser becomes a powerful and flexible window into existing workflows.

When browsing the web, if the user hovers over an HTML element that is identified as an image, a "download" icon appears to indicate that this image can be saved into the current workspace. Long click (or click and pull toward yourself) to save out the image.

Future versions of Softspace will enable website bookmarking, and the ability to snip portions of the browser window as images.

Images

As you can read in our origin myth, Softspace was born during a research residency I had in an art and design studio. Immediately before that residency, I had been in architecture school. Today, architects and designers remain a core audience for this tool. Therefore, visual research, reasoning, and communication are critical use cases for Softspace.

These use cases, of course, require the ability to work with image files.

Prototype05 ports over the image processing and displaying modules from SoftspaceVR. Right now, the only way to bring image files into the workspace is by saving them out from the web browser, but we're already at working on a Dropbox file importer.

Side Note: Image LODing

One of the (many) interesting (and annoying) new problems that spatial computing presents is the question of how to technically display a large number of images in a 3D space.

Unlike on a conventional scrollable 2D document, where only a limited fraction of a document's contents are visible at once, a 3D workspace allows the user to potentially see many hundreds or thousands of images simultaneously.

At the same time, users are able to view images from very close up; to avoid blurriness, the system needs to be able to render images at very high resolution.

Given the limited VRAM of any computing device, not to speak of the even lower constraints of a mobile device like the Meta Quest 2, it would be impossible to display all these images at the highest possible level of quality all the time.

Therefore, Softspace implements a novel Level-of-Detail system that uses the apparent angular size of each image to assign it an LOD value, which then determines which version of the image texture to load and display. These assignments are updated several times a second, and images transition seamlessly from 256px preview textures to 2048px full-res textures, as needed.

Text Level-of-Details

One of the issues users experienced in previous prototypes was that text became too small to read when the workspace was scaled down or move far away from the user. Once the text of the workspace became illegible, the workspace become nonsensical—a pretty visualization of something without meaning.

Prototype05 takes a first pass at rendering text bodies at different Levels-of-Detail, depending on text item size and distance relative to the user.

Just before a text block becomes too small to read, the text body is replaced with larger font. To prevent overflow of the text item bounds, this larger text is truncated. I find that being able to read the first few sentences or words of text items is enough to give me a much better sense of what different areas of the workspace are about.

Extra points: a more sophisticated version of this system could display an auto-generated summary of the text (e.g. using AI) instead of just using the first sentences.

Multiple Open Topics

In Prototype04, only one Topic item could be expanded at a time. If you expanded a Topic while another was open, the first would automatically be collapsed. The intention behind this design was to permit intuitive transclusion of content items (text, images) across multiple Topics.

However, a common point of feedback was that Prototype04 felt too messy and chaotic with all the Topics and text items floating everywhere. People who tried both Prototypes 03 and 04 tended to prefer 03's single fixed layout, especially while creating and editing content.

Prototype05 partially solves this problem by allowing multiple topics to be expanded and positioned next to each other. (If two topics share any content items, then they will still be mutually exclusively expandable).

I'm also working on a way for future versions of Softspace to have a single, global ordinospatial layout, like Prototype03 has.

Known Issues

An incomplete list of things I want to improve in upcoming prototypes:

• Arm fatigue. As originally pointed out by Andy Matuschak, and subsequently raised by many other users, the point-of-view based ray cursor is tiresome to use in a way that a mouse, or even the Oculus OS laser pointer, is not. I have been sketching out improvements on this front.

• Cursor icons. It’s about time to swap out the red debugging sphere that represents where the cursor is pointing in space with a proper set of icons.

• Topic ergonomics. Topic items currently maintain a vertical orientation, which can cause strain when you spend a lot of time writing text or moving images around on one. I’ve investigating more ergonomic orientations when a topic is actively being edited.

• Click-to-focus. Often, users want to get a closer look at a particular item without having to “swim” themselves over to it. I’m thinking about implementing a double-click-to-focus interaction that makes it much faster and easier to inspect things.

• More UI feedback. SoftspaceVR relied on hand controllers, which for all their downsides, did provide excellent haptic feedback when the user was interacting with things. In a tracked-hand interaction model, we need much more visual and auditory feedback to let the user know what they’re doing in the UI, or what will happen next.

As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read this! Your comments, ideas, and concerns are always welcome. You can help us on this journey by:

• Getting and testing this prototype 🧑🏽‍🔬

• Following and retweeting us on Twitter 🐦

• Joining the Discord channel 👯‍♀️

Until next time!

Yiliu

For the past few weeks I’ve been gearing up to build the first MVP of SoftspaceAR.

My focus during this period was writing a paper that described what the product will be, why it works the way it does, who it’s for, and how they will use it. Today, I’d like to share that document with you.

Between SoftspaceVR and the Prototypes, we have a ton of conceptual, design, and technical building blocks to draw from. But there wasn’t any one thing I could point when somebody asked, “So what are you building, actually?”

More and more people have been asking this! My tweeting and writing has earned us some attention in various corners of the internet, and several very interesting opportunities have come our way. For those who ask, this document is my working answer to that question.

Most importantly, it’s a roadmap we will use to build the first version of SoftspaceAR that you can use in a real workflow. It will guide the next prototypes we build and release, each of which will move intentionally toward the design described here.

Abstract

A critical step in creative knowledge work is synthesis: the distillation of disjointed data into coherent ideas. As information problems become more complex, and good ideas increasingly valuable, individuals and groups demand better tools for managing and synthesizing knowledge.

We observe three trends in software aiming to meet this demand: spatial canvases (e.g. Muse, Figma), knowledge graphs (e.g. Roam, Obsidian), and collaboration (e.g. Zoom, Teams).

However, legacy tools remain constrained by their flat, bounded interfaces. Our design for Softspace proposes a collaborative spatial knowledge graph that transcends the 2D paradigm, offering creative knowledge workers the ultimate tool for thought.

I. Introduction

Knowledge Synthesis

The creative knowledge economy runs on great ideas, executed well.

A critical step in developing these ideas is knowledge synthesis: the work of recombining a large, disjointed collection of information into something simple, coherent, and valuable.

A designer synthesizes a wall of references into a beautiful product design. An entrepreneur synthesizes stacks of market data into a bold business strategy. A researcher synthesizes a myriad of observations about the world into an elegant explanation.

Synthesis is hard. To do it well, we have to hold many pieces of the puzzle in our head at once, and test innumerable combinations of ideas. Synthesis gets exponentially harder as the quantity and complexity of the information we’re working with increases.

Spatial Computing

By making the sharing, processing, and storage of information fast, cheap, and reliable, computers have become invaluable to knowledge workers. Yet when we use computers for knowledge synthesis, it becomes apparent that the UI is now the bottleneck.

Simplistically: laptop screens are too small and flat for working on big knowledge problems. They don’t let us see enough of the puzzle at once, and the way they show information makes remembering or reasoning about it difficult when it’s out of view—which is most of the time.

Spatial computing offers a solution. XR headsets let us see, remember, and think about far more information than before, by displaying it in immersive 3D. This may be a new paradigm for software, but it’s one to which our brains and bodies are exceedingly well-adapted.

Softspace

Softspace is an XR productivity and creativity app that gives creative knowledge workers a powerful new way to organize, develop, and communicate great ideas.

In our design, users work with conventional content types (e.g. text, images, PDFs, and websites) within a radical new paradigm: a collaborative 3D knowledge graph.

Through a workflow that combines elements of notetaking, mindmapping, and moodboarding, users build up spatial information workspaces that reflect the structure of their ideas.

Users then compose and export linear syntheses of their knowledge graphs, in the form of markdown files, for use in downstream workflows.

The immersive virtual workspace allows collaborators to step into the same information space for discussion and co-creation, regardless of physical distance.

II. Design

Items

The entity primitive in Softspace is the item. Items are single pieces of content data, or containers that hold other items. Items correspond to what are called blocks in some other knowledge-management tools, such as Notion or Roam.

Content Items

Conceptually, content items map best onto single files, although in cases such as text and URLs this correspondence does not strictly hold. Initially, content item types in Softspace include:

• text paragraphs

• static images

• PDF documents

• bookmarked websites

Future updates to Softspace may implement, among others:

• tweets

• videos

• podcasts

Container Items

As their name suggests, container items hold other items. The initial design for Softspace only specifies a single type of container: the topic.

Topics can either be expanded or collapsed.

• While expanded, the contents of a topic are displayed in a fixed ordinospatial layout that makes use of all three spatial dimensions while constraining contents to a single linear order. This ordinality makes topics mappable to conventional document formats (such as markdown), and usable as 3D notes.

• While collapsed, the text contents of a topic become hidden. However, backlinks from hidden text to other topics are visible as connections between the collapsed topic and referent topics. Images, PDFs, websites, and other non-text contents remain visible—they float free of the collapsed topic, but remain visually and spatially connected to it.

Topics have a title: a string value that identifies that topic within the workspace. Future updates to Softspace will implement topic aliases: alternative titles (to accommodate capitalization, synonyms, orthographical variants, etc.) by which one topic is identified.

When exporting a Softspace workspace, each topic is interpreted as a markdown file whose filename is the topic title, and whose contents are those of the topic.

For performance and technical implementation reasons, the initial design of Softspace will only permit a single topic to be expanded at a time. Later updates will allow multiple topics to be expanded simultaneously.

For performance and technical implementation reasons, the initial design of Softspace will not permit nested topics—i.e. topics cannot contain each other. Later updates will enable this.

Transclusion

Transclusion is a term coined by Ted Nelson in his 1980 publication Literary Machines. It refers to the concept of including a single piece of content across multiple contexts as live instances, so that a change in one instance is reflected across all instances.

Softspace implements transclusion by allowing item types to be contained by any number of topics. Adding a transcludable item to a topic does not remove it from its other containers.

Initially, this will be possible for item types which are highly atomic (semantically independent of their immediate context) and/or relatively immutable. Text items do not meet this criterion, and can therefore only be contained in a single topic at a time.

Transclusion allows topic containers to function as tags.

Backlinks

The popularity of the note-taking app Roam Research (and Roam-like apps) can be largely attributed to its use of the backlink as a core interaction primitive. A backlink is an in-line reference from text to a conceptual entity. In the case of Roam, backlinks point to notes. In Softspace, backlinks point to topics.

Our design borrows the [[]]-notation of Roam. Terms within a text item which are surrounded by double square brackets will be visually and spatially linked to the topic with the same title as the enclosed text. If no such topic exists, one will be created.

When a topic is collapsed, the backlinks from its hidden text items remain visible as indicator lines that connect the collapsed topic to referent topics. In future updates, these indicators will display the snippet of text which contains the backlink.

Spatiality

Whiteboarding apps like Miro have proven the tangible value of being able to lay out information spatially in a software tool. Many apps which feature a canvas for UI design purposes, such as Figma, are often used as general-purpose boards instead. New tools built on this basic pattern seem to emerge daily, from Muse to Heptabase to Apple’s upcoming Freeform.

Spatial interfaces are effective because our brains have evolved to be astoundingly good at perceiving, remembering, and interpreting where objects are in our environment.

But a spatial canvas displayed on a laptop screen suffers from three drawbacks:

1. 2D supports less spatial complexity than 3D, limiting spatial semantics.

2. The view cuts off at the edge of the screen, limiting contextual awareness.

3. The user is not situated within the workspace, limiting spatial memory.

The design premise of Softspace is a 3D spatial canvas within which the user is situated; therefore, it bypasses the above three constraints.

Further, our design incorporates three distinct modes for the spatial positioning of items in a workspace. These modes are optimized for different phases in the workflow.

Ordinospatial Layout

Within an expanded topic, items are laid out using a front-to-back, left-to-right, top-to-bottom system called an ordinospatial layout. All three spatial dimensions are used to arrange contents, but there is a definite order that makes each topic interpretable as a linear document.

This mode is best for the content a user is working on directly at that moment. Using this layout is conceptually similar to drafting a 3D note.

Force-Directed Layout

Items whose positions are not fixed within an expanded topic are subject to the force-directed layout system. This is a simulation-based layout system that automatically gathers related items closer together in space, and pushes unrelated ones further apart.

Related items are those with a semantic relation in the knowledge graph. The initial design specifies two such relation types:

• containment: the relation between a topic and its included contents

• reference: the relation between a text item and topics it links to via [[]]-notation

This mode is best for content that is not currently being worked on. Items move themselves into a spatial configuration that makes visible the relationships between them.

Cartesian Layout

Items not in an expanded topic can also be pinned in place, so that their position and rotation is no longer determined by the force-directed graph simulation. Instead, they remain at a fixed, user-determined Cartesian coordinate.

This mode is best for reference items that should be held in a specific spatial configuration.

Workspaces

The highest-level organizational unit of Softspace is the workspace.

Items are always created within a workspace. Initially, items will only have a single parent workspace; later updates may enable cross-workspace transclusion.

Users can create, manage, open, close, and delete workspaces using an in-headset UI. The initial design for Softspace only permits a single workspace to be open at a time.

Workspaces can either be local or cloud. Local workspace data is stored completely on-device, and are not multiuser-compatible. Cloud workspaces store their data to the cloud, and are multiuser-compatible. Softspace will launch with only local workspaces; cloud workspaces will be implemented shortly afterward.

User permissions are managed at the workspace level. Permissions roles can include owner, administrator, and guest access.

Workflow Integration

A key challenge when using mobile devices for productivity is the lack of a common file system. XR headsets are no exception. This deficit adds friction to the process of bringing files into and out of mobile software. If this friction is too high, it can feel like work gets “stuck” in the device, which understandably deters use.

Softspace is a designed to minimize this friction. It does this by:

• Prioritizing support for content formats that are common across knowledge workflows, such as images, PDFs, and markdown files

• Integrating with popular cloud file storage services like Dropbox, with automatic exports to maintain a readily-accessible copy of work outside the headset

• Implementing a full-featured in-app browser that makes the web easily accessible from within the headset

The goal is to maximize upstream and downstream compatibility with existing workflows, while retaining the unique advantages of this new computing medium. Users can quickly bring files into Softspace, work on them there, then easily access the contents of that workspace from their other devices at any time.

Common File Formats

Initially, users will be able to import:

• Text files (.txt)

• Markdown files (.md)

• Image files (.jpg/.jpeg, .png, .tif/.tiff)

• PDF files (.pdf)

Users will be able to export workspaces as a collection of 1) markdown files that correspond to its topics, and 2) image and PDF files.

Cloud Storage Integration

Cloud file storage access is available in the form of a simple 2D web app that is accessible in-headset. It allows users to log into their cloud storage accounts, select files and folders for import, and select folders to export workspaces into.

The first such integration will be with Dropbox, because of its large user base. We are also exploring Google Drive and local network drive access.

In-App Web Browser

A good web browser is central to almost all knowledge workflows. We implement a full-featured browser within Softspace that gives users access to the rest of the web, including the web app versions of complementary tools.

The in-app browser will allow the user to:

• Browse websites, including web apps

• Bookmark websites for future reference

• Save images files from the web into workspaces

• Snip any portion of the browser window into workspaces

• Copy/paste text to and from text items

Multiuser Support

Although by catalyzed the pandemic, we expect the importance of remote work to continue well into the future as companies seek top talent, and talent seeks geo-flexibility.

However, video-based remote collaboration tools fall far short of the creative magic that is possible when working together in-person. XR closes the gap by creating a true sense of social co-presence between collaborators in the same virtual workspace.

Softspace will not initially support multiple users, but its technical architecture has been designed from the beginning with multiuser collaboration in mind. We will enable this feature once cloud workspaces are implemented, as this is a key technical prerequisite.

Interaction Model

Spatial computing remains in its infancy, and is evolving rapidly and divergently.

The Softspace interaction model is designed to rely as little as possible on the specific features of today’s headsets, and to be highly portable across hardware and input paradigms.

Therefore, our design only assumes a head-mounted 6DoF AR device (passthrough or see-through) with high-fidelity hand tracking and bluetooth keyboard support.

Augmented Reality

Full-occlusion virtual reality is unsuitable (at least as the default mode) for a tool intended for use in professional settings. Blindness to one’s immediate physical surroundings gives rise to a sense of unease and vulnerability. This prevents many users from entering the state of flow that is necessary for doing their best creative work.

The design of Softspace is premised on an augmented reality paradigm that allows users to see their immediate environment. Virtual UI elements appear to float in this space. Initially, it will not be possible to anchor items to specific points in the physical environment, but this functionality will come with later updates.

Happily, even the low-resolution passthrough augmented reality of the Quest headset is sufficient to dispel the discomfort that arises from visual occlusion.

Hand Tracking

Currently, the most common input device for XR headsets is the hand controller. Optimized for gaming, this device is poorly suited to productivity use cases, because:

• It must be held in the hand at all times, precluding the use of a keyboard

• Its form, balance, and button placement are reminiscent of weaponry

• It adds two more devices to keep charged, remember to pack, etc.

Therefore, all non-keyboard inputs in Softspace rely only on computer vision-based hand tracking, which has already been developed to a very high level of usability and reliability.

Locomotion

The way that virtual objects are overlaid on the view of the physical environment in Softspace makes user locomotion through the workspace technically equivalent to the spatial repositioning of the workspace around the user. The only difference between the two is frame of reference.

Locomotion—or correspondingly, workspace repositioning—is initiated by forming a fist with one or both hands. This action “grabs” the workspace where the hand(s) is positioned. The user then moves the grabbing hand(s) to move, rotate, and scale the workspace.

Manipulation

Our philosophy for the design of the Softspace UI can be characterized by leveraged direct manipulation. We want to give users a feeling of high agency, effectiveness, and control when interacting with objects in the workspace.

Users highlight UI elements with a line-of-sight system, which uses an imaginary ray from the eye to the hand as its targeting vector.

Once an item is highlighted, pinching the tip of the index finger to the thumb is interpreted as a click action, which either causes the highlighted object to be used or grabbed.

Movements in the grabbing hand cause the grabbed item to be repositioned, with a leverage factor being applied to its motion along the user’s vector of view.

Grabbing an item with two hands enables rescaling and resizing.

Text Input

Given the centrality of natural language in knowledge work, text is a first-class content type in Softspace. Fast, accurate, frictionless text input is therefore absolutely critical.

Given these requirements, there is simply no viable alternative to the use of a physical (bluetooth) keyboard as the primary text input device. However, a backup virtual keyboard is available at all times.

Future releases of Softspace will explore additional text input methods, such as speech-to-text.

Art Design

The designer of XR software has much more control over the sensory input of their user than the designer of a 2D app does. While in Softspace, everything a user sees (and much of what they hear) is the result of decisions we will have made. This gives us great power to shape the user experience, but also comes with greater responsibility to ensure it’s a good one.

Two principles underpin the art design of Softspace: comfort and productivity.

Comfort

Comfort in Softspace has both an aesthetic and a performance component.

Given the full-immersion nature of XR, less is more. Our aesthetic design is restrained and minimal. We rely on a limited palette of colors and a familiar set of geometries. We prefer to subtract, adding only when necessary.

Performance-wise, maintaining a smooth 90fps on the Quest 2 (and 72fps on the Quest) is critical for user comfort. We therefore make creative use of a few simple meshes and shaders, to minimize compute load as the number of items in the workspace increases.

Productivity

Most XR software today is for gaming, entertainment, or other use cases where there is heightened value in sensory stimulation and excitement.

In contrast, we are building software for deep work. To support this, we wish to promote focus, creativity, and flow instead.

Softspace UI elements, passthrough color filtering, animation behaviors and velocities, and other aspects of its look-and-feel are calibrated to foster these qualities.

III. User

The intended user of Softspace is a high-agency knowledge worker whose livelihood depends on her ability to quickly and effectively synthesize complex sets of information. She might be:

• An entrepreneur writing a product requirement doc

• A design researcher summarizing user interviews

• An independent analyst drafting a Substack post

• An architect crafting a deck about a new project

• A grad student outlining a chapter of her thesis

She currently uses a combination of analog tools (pen and paper, physical boards) and digital ones (Notion, Apple Notes) to collect information, make sense of it, and draft documents.

Crucially, she feels an acute frustration with the limitation of existing tools. She may be exploring spatial canvases (Muse, Figma) or structured note-taking apps (Roam, Notion) to help her manage and make use of her knowledge base.

These apps are steps in the right direction, but she wonders why there still isn’t software that gets close to the creative magic of a shared team project space.

Of course, to be able to download and use Softspace, she will need to have access to a compatible headset (e.g. a Quest 2).

IV. Flow

Workflow Phases

Formally, the intended user flow of Softspace can be divided into three phases:

1. Collection: adding relevant information to a workspace via cloud storage and the web

2. Construction: building up the knowledge graph by writing notes and composing topics

3. Collation: composing synthesis topics intended for export as linear outlines or drafts

In practice, we expected users to cycle through this flow many times, jumping between steps as they seek to make sense of a knowledge problem and explore different solutions to it.

Example Flow

For example, this is how somebody might use Softspace to draft a design proposal:

1. Collect images and PDFs related to the project into a Dropbox folder. Export notes from a note-taking app as markdown files into the Dropbox folder. This content likely includes:

   • project brief

   • reference images

   • client interview notes

   • previous project materials

2. Launch Softspace on headset, and create a new workspace.

3. Using the cloud storage UI, import the contents of the Dropbox folder to the workspace.

   • Text and markdown files are converted into Softspace topic items

   • Images and PDFs are converted to the corresponding content items

4. Build up a project knowledge map from these contents by:

   • Creating and writing text blocks

   • Creating topic and adding content to them

   • Referencing various topics from within text

   • Adding images using the in-app web browser

   • Copy/pasting text using the in-app web browser

   • Bookmarking URLs using the in-app web browser

5. Create a new synthesis topic which is intended for export. Compose a draft of the design proposal through a combination of 1) including content items already in the workspace and 2) writing new text that ties ideas and content together.

6. Using the cloud storage UI, select a Dropbox folder to export the workspace to. (This can be a one-off action, or be set to recur automatically.)

7. Copy the synthesis topic’s markdown file into a word processor for editing and formatting.

This is the fourth in a series of prototypes we’re releasing as a part of our open development process to build the augmented reality version of Softspace.

Help us invent a powerful new kind of tool for thought by testing these prototypes 🧑🏽‍🔬, following us on Twitter 🐦, and joining the Softspace Discord 👯‍♀️.

SoftspaceAR Prototype04 is out! You can download the APK here, then install it on your Quest 2 using SideQuest or the Oculus Developer Hub.

This prototype is an answer to the question: Could a spatial interface let you work with the true shape of your ideas?

To see how this question leads to the design of Prototype04, we need to take a step back and understand what this question even means.

In what sense do ideas have a shape, and why does their shape matter?

The Structure of Knowledge

What is the structure of knowledge? In other words: what are the actual things that constitute knowledge, and how are they related to each other?

There are many possible answers to this question. It could be that knowledge is one very long sequence of information; or a scattered field of points that don’t relate to each other at all; or a Borgesian state space of permutational nonsense through which we rifle for nuggets of Truth.

(I’m going to dodge the notoriously divisive question of what constitutes knowledge in the first place, as opposed to other kinds of information like data, or sensory experience. Let’s go with a Stewartian definition of knowledge for now. It’s the thing that PKM folks think about all the time. It’s what knowledge workers are busy working on. It’s the kind of information that tools for thought help you better create, understand, and harness.)

How knowledge is structured matters, because its structure defines what we consider to be legitimate strategies for seeking and creating it.

For example, if knowledge were actually a single long sequence of information (e.g. the revealed word of a deity), then we would seek knowledge within the canon, and create knowledge by expanding on canonical points.

The biblical reference might make this model seem epistemologically unsound… but consider that this is how a lot of writing is produced. Pieces start out as a small list of points, each of which is then expanded into a collection of points, some of which need further elaboration—all while maintaining the overall single-sequence structure.

Another candidate for the structure of knowledge is the tree: information is grouped into topics, which are themselves grouped into topics, going from the specific to the general. This model is the basis for the Dewey Decimal System, which is used to organize books in libraries. It’s also how most people think of species as being organized: within an evolutionary Tree of Life.

If knowledge is structured as a tree, you should seek knowledge by determining the general category that information would be found in, then follow the path of narrowing subtopics until you get to your answer. The work of creating knowledge would be the work of discovering new pieces of information and deciding which sub-sub-sub-branch it belongs to, or filling in categorical “missing links” between something higher up in the tree with something lower down. This is literally how librarians and taxonomists work.

Knowledge is a Network

The problem is that these models prove incomplete under closer scrutiny.

Biblical hermeneutics is the discipline of interpreting and elaborating on the received word, and is a critical bridge between what’s written in the Bible and important practical questions like “should capital punishment be allowed”? These interpretations are core theological knowledge, but they don’t simply slot into the existing sequence of the Bible. Rather, they can draw on information from across the text—or indeed, other authoritative interpretations—to arrive at their conclusions.

The librarian’s dream is every book in its proper place, neatly arranged according to the single totalizing hierarchy of the Dewey Decimal System. But underneath their calm, hardbound surfaces, books are seething with non-hierarchicial irregularities. Footnotes and citations in the text refer to texts that could be on the next shelf down, or in a totally different category two floors up, forming a vast, nonlinear web of meaning.

Even the evolutionary Tree of Life, which seems to hold true for the vast majority of species that reproduce sexually, proves more convoluted than taxonomists would like. Consider the case of the hoatzin, a bird that defies all attempts to paint an orderly picture of the tree of bird species.

These examples hint at a different model.

If knowledge can be said to have a global structure, there’s a lot of evidence pointing to that structure being a network. Technically, it’s a graph in which pieces of information are the nodes and relationships between those pieces are the edges.

Why might we think this?

• Footnotes and citations in texts referencing other texts, or even other sections in the same text, form a nonlinear graph structure.

  

• Mind maps almost always take on a graph-like structure, with node-like concepts connected by lines.

  

• A new generation of graph-based note-taking apps (spearheaded by Roam Research) have become very popular, very quickly, in academic and professional communities that work intensively with knowledge.

Anecdotally, a lot of people who were uncommonly good at working with knowledge also seem to intuit its underlying structure as graph-like.

Here’s Steve Jobs:

"Creativity is just connecting things… When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Also, Albert Einstein:

“The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined… this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought… the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for.”

Last, and never least, James Webb Young:

“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements [and] the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships.”

Graphs Are Hard

With the graph-like structure of knowledge (hopefully) established, let’s get back to the original question:

Could a spatial interface let you work within the true shape of your ideas?

Ideas are knowledge, and the “true shape” of your ideas is the way that the graph-like structure of knowledge is manifested within the ideas you’re working on.

Analogous to the way that language shapes what we can think, or architectural drawing techniques shape what we can build, our tools and methods for working with knowledge shape what we can come to know.

If knowledge really is graph-like, then the most effective strategies for seeking and creating it would be those that treat it as such. Tools that obscure or ignore its underlying structure would limit our ability to do knowledge work.

Unfortunately, graphs are notoriously difficult to represent usably in the kind of bounded, 2D interfaces that computer monitors encourage. Graphs are large, nonlinear, and multi-scalar, three qualities that 2D UIs struggle with.

And if our flat tools are limiting our ability to work with the true shape our ideas, then they’re limiting how well we can understand and develop them.

Spatial Knowledge Graphs

SoftspaceAR Prototype04 proposes a new paradigm for representing knowledge graphs—one that’s free of the limitations of 2D UIs by virtue of its use of spatial computing.

• This paradigm is a 3D spatial canvas in which user can create text blocks.

• Any terms in the text which are surrounded by double square brackets are interpreted as topics to which that text refers (syntax borrowed from Roam).

• Text and topics are our informational nodes, and the references from text to topic are one of two kinds of possible relation.

• The other kind of relation that is possible is inclusion: topics can be expanded, and text added to that topic as a way of defining it.

A 3D forced-directed graph simulation running in the background automatically tries to move related items together, while pushing unrelated ones apart. As the user creates, relates, unrelates, and deletes pieces of information, the system constantly updates the overall shape of the knowledge contained within.

Prototype04 shows some of the advantages of working with knowledge graphs spatially:

• A spatial interface offers much more room to display the nodes of a graph. In fact, this even allows the graph to display individual text blocks as nodes, instead of the entire pages that many 2D graph views settle for.

• The global shape of the graph is generated from the local, node-to-node interactions. This global form is an important part of the meaning of the knowledge graph, because it suggests what the higher-level cluster or syntheses of the details could be.

• Object permanence makes it expected and intuitive that items would be includable in multiple contexts. This makes it straightforward to implement true transclusion.

• While working on a given node, you can see direct and indirect connections receding into the distance. This creates ambient contextual awareness, so you always know “where” you are within your ideas.

How to use Prototype04

1. When you launch the prototype for the first time, a pre-constructed knowledge graph loads.

2. Click on any text block to start editing it.

3. Press Return at the end of a text block to create a new text block, and press Backspace when typing on an empty text block to delete it.

4. As you write on a text block, terms enclosed in double square brackets are interpreted as topic references.

5. Prototype04 will find or create the topic with the matching title (case-sensitive) and link it to the text block where you typed out the term.

   

6. As more topics are created, and more text blocks refer to different topics, the system automatically draws related items together and pushes unrelated ones apart—building up the shape of your ideas as you write them out.

7. Topics are more than just tags for drawing related text blocks together. Topics are epistemic entities that can contain content.

8. Click on a topic’s title to expand it into a board. Click anywhere on the board to create a new, pre-contained text block.

   

9. You can also grab an existing text item and add it to the topic board, or pull text items off and let them float away.

   

10. Clicking on the topic title again, or expanding a different topic, will collapse it and allow the contained text items to float away—while remaining connected with a bold connection line.

    

11. A text item can be contained in any number of topics—the system permits true transclusion.

    

12. Topics are created automatically when referenced for the first time, and deleted automatically if they are no longer referenced and contain no text.

    

13. Your work isn’t stuck in the headset! Each topic automatically exports itself as a markdown file, making it easy to bring your work into the rest of your workflow. These .md files are called “Lenses”.

Known Issues

• Text blocks and topic titles that are far away become difficult to read—this is a major limitation. I have an idea for a text LODing system that would address this.

• Links are currently represented using a simple straight line between the linked items. These get in the way of text, and don’t tell you much when you can’t see the other end. They generally need design work.

• Prototype01 took eight weeks start-to-finish. P02 took four weeks; P03 took five weeks; and this prototype took me six weeks. I want to reverse this trend and get the build cycles back toward four weeks or less.

Next Steps

• Currently, topic boards use a single column layout, but there’s no reason why each topic’s internal layout system couldn’t be a full ordinospatial layout like the one in Prototype03.

• I think this paradigm will really shine with the (re)introduction of images and PDFs.

• The only way to create new content right now is by typing out text, but I will port over the very flexible in-app web browser from SoftspaceVR. This allows you to save out full-res images, copy/paste text, snip any part of the browser window into PNG, and create website bookmarks.

• Only one topic can be expanded at time right now, but we’ll probably want to let users keep several topics open at once; this raises the question of how to represent content blocks that are transcluded across multiple expanded topics.

• These prototypes write to, and read from, the headset’s local storage, which is a real pain to access. Production builds will use a Dropbox backend at first, and expand to other backend options later (IPFS anyone?).

• There’s currently a hard distinction between text blocks and topic items, which isn’t necessary. It would be far more elegant and flexible to allow any content block to become a topic container, so that ideas can be defined recursively.

That’s it for now! This post is the longest one yet, coming in at just under 2500 words, so if you made it this far—thanks and congrats 😄.

If you’d like to support this work, please consider following us on Twitter, trying out Prototype04, and joining our Discord to offer your questions, ideas, and criticisms.

Until next time,

Yiliu

This is the third in a series of prototypes we’re releasing as a part of our open development process to build the augmented reality version of Softspace.

Help us invent a powerful new kind of tool for thought by 🧑🏽‍🔬 trying these prototypes, 🐦 following us on Twitter, and 👯‍♀️ joining the Softspace Discord.

SoftspaceAR Prototype03 just dropped! You can download it here and install it with SideQuest or the Oculus Developer Hub desktop app.

The Short Version

Prototype03 is about making Softspace deeply interoperable with your other tools.

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.

Words can only go so far in conveying how any 3D UI works, so I encourage you to get the prototype and let me know what you think (via Twitter, Discord, or email).

Or, you can do that after reading this deeper dive 💪🏽🧠👇🏼.

Layout Systems

Softspace is a tool for working with the ideas and knowledge that you already use in your projects. This knowledge takes the form of text, images, websites, PDFs, videos, and other content. To position all this content in 3D space, we need to use a layout system.

Ideally, this layout system places things according to how they’re related to each other in the underlying data structure. This way, you can understand those relations just by looking at where things are, and you can modify them by moving things around.

For example: the tasks in your favorite to-do app are laid out in the order that they’re saved in the underlying database. If you drag in item into another position, the database is updated to match. Order == priority, so this interaction lets you reprioritize upcoming tasks.

Across knowledge management tools, notes are a core format. Therefore, to make Softspace highly interoperable with existing knowledge workflows, it should have good support for the data structure that notes come in: text documents.

A defining characteristic of elements in a text file is their order in the document. We want Softspace’s layout system to express that ordinality. At the same time, we don’t want to give up all the benefits of spatiality by simply rendering a 2D document floating in front of you.

We need to invent a layout system that is strictly ordinal, yet meaningfully spatial.

Ordinality

The biggest advantage of ordinality is portability. Imagine an email you draft with speech-to-text, then finish and send on your laptop, before it’s read on someone’s phone. Its fixed sequence of information can adapt to very different contexts without losing much, if any, of its meaning.

The ordinality of HTML allows for websites that respond consistently to different screen sizes. The ordinality of natural language lets us turn books into audiobooks and back. (The non-ordinality of spreadsheets makes them a huge pain to work with on a phone.)

There’s another, deeper benefit to ordinality. Ordinal content maps directly onto the temporal structure of human experience. That gives its authors a high degree of control over when ideas are encountered, and how they build on each other.

On the other hand, ordinal formats struggle as working environments for generating knowledge, because at larger scales, knowledge is not ordinal (it’s nested and networked).

As internet pioneer Ted Nelson puts it:

With all due respect to Ted: I actually think that writers do important and difficult work by charting navigable paths through that “tapestry of interconnection”. But he’s also right. We lose something crucial if our tools and methods obscure the true shape of that tapestry.

Spatiality

Softspace uses the emerging medium of spatial computing to let you work with that tapestry outside the limits of small, flat screens. We also believe that spatial layouts can unlock your innate superpowers of spatial perception, reasoning, and memory.

A maximally spatial layout system would let you place things freely in a 2D or 3D canvas. There might be fancy mechanics like collision detection or snapping, but ultimately, every element’s position would be determined by an (x, y, z) coordinate. This is how most whiteboarding apps, like Miro, work.

Within this Cartesian playground, you get the full benefits of spatiality. You can construct richly meaningful configurations of information that express a lot of nuance and complexity. If you work in one for a while, you can really recall and explore these layouts in your mind’s eye afterward.

The problem with freely spatial layouts is that you can’t reliably put their elements into a coherent order. And without this ordinality, spatial layouts are hard to port to less-spatial contexts.

For example, a lot of meaning is lost when you export a Miro board to a linear document. Also, the process uses an “across-then-down” heuristic that creates unpleasant surprises in content order.

When you add a third dimension, the problem gets much worse. 3D Cartesian layouts, like those in previous versions of Softspace, are essentially impossible to export cleanly.

Ordinospatial Layouts

So ordinal data format are high portable, but obscure how information ties together. Spatial layouts reveal those interconnections, but aren’t very portable. Could we have the best of both worlds?

This prototype implements an experimental layout system that enforces a strict order to elements, but lets you position them relatively freely all three spatial dimensions.

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. You can use SideQuest to retrieve it at: sdcard / Android / data / com.softspace.ar.prototype03 / Prototype03-Text.md.

Conclusions

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

✅ 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? I would say yes, but ultimately, only users can judge if this criterion has been met.

Future Ideas

• Mapping breaks in the x, y, and z axes to H3, H2, and H1 headings in markdown.

• Prototype03 only writes out a very simple markdown file, with paragraph blocks only. Future builds would need to support all the major block types.

• Instead of pointing to local headset storage, point to a Dropbox folder.

• Image file support

• In-headset browser support

• Tag / wikilink support

UX Improvements

• Grip interactions are disabled when a hand is not within a certain zone of activation in front of your head, to prevent accidentally moving the workspace while typing. Thanks to Brian Eppert for this suggestion.

• Fatigue from having to hold your hand in the air to interact with elements is real. I'm working on ways to mitigate this, both by reducing the number of interactions that require raising your hands (e.g. making text boxes navigable using the arrow keys), and increasing the speed and ease of hand interactions (e.g. making positioning of objects snappier and more responsive). Thanks to Andy Matuschak for pointing out this issue.

That’s a wrap. As always—thanks so much for reading, and please don’t hesitate to reach out with your thoughts, comments, and questions!

Until next time,

Yiliu

This was the first in a series of prototypes we’re releasing as a part of our open development process to build the augmented reality version of Softspace.

Help us invent a powerful new kind of tool for thought by 🧑🏽‍🔬 trying these prototypes, 🐦 following us on Twitter, and 👯‍♀️ joining the Softspace Discord.

I released SoftspaceAR Prototype01 a month ago. As a quick reminder, it’s a passthrough AR app that lets you explore a 3D forced-directed graph of a Dropbox folder’s contents.

I launched Prototype01 on the same day I announced the larger project of prototyping my way toward a new, augmented reality version of Softspace. At the time, I didn’t dig too deeply into the ideas and experiments embodied by this first research demo.

Since then, I released Prototype02 (which is all about writing), and have started work on Prototype03 (which is all about spatial layouts that are also ordinal; more on that soon).

Before this first prototype becomes too much of a distant memory, I wanted to review the important lessons I drew from it, and highlight some of the feedback I’ve gotten from you—our intrepid test users!

Key Conclusions

From developing, building, and testing Prototype01, I was able to draw three main conclusions that are relevant to the future design of SoftspaceAR.

1. The Quest 2’s passthrough is good enough.

Passthrough AR is augmented reality that shows you the physical world via video, instead of through a transparent display (”see-through” AR?).

The Quest 2’s passthrough AR mode is a retrofitted feature. It piggybacks on the inside-out tracking system’s cameras, so the positioning relative to your eyes isn’t optimal, and the video from the infrared cameras is low-res and lacks color.

It turns out that despite its limitations, the Quest 2’s passthrough is more than good enough to build a productivity app on. It adequately solves several key problems:

• Even muddy grayscale passthrough eliminates the sense of unease and vulnerability that arises when you can’t see what’s happening around you, which is a major hurdle to VR usage for many people (myself included).

• Although the visual quality is pretty rough, the latency and refresh rate on the passthrough video is very good, which means it doesn’t cause nausea. This is likely a benefit inherited from the requirements of the inside-out tracking system.

• The camera positioning only becomes an issue for things that are closer than about a foot from your face, which means manipulating most things within arm’s length (like a nice bluetooth keyboard) is totally fine.

This means that even the Quest’s crappy passthrough lets you work in the headset comfortably, happily, and productively for longer stretches of time—and we know that future headsets will only improve on this experience (e.g. Project Cambria, Apple’s first headset).

2. The Quest 2’s hand tracking is good enough, and getting better.

Because of Oculus’ focus on gaming, hand controllers have long been the primary input device. They offer the precision and tactility that fast-paced, action-packed games need.

However, controllers get in the way when you need to use a keyboard, and there’s something that feels... off about doing work while holding what feels vaguely like a plastic gun in each hand.

Enter hand-tracking.

The Quest 2’s hand-tracking capabilities are pretty magical, especially considering that it’s running on—once again—grainy grayscale video from the inside-out tracking system. (ML FTW!) Even so, there’s noticeable latency, pose precision and confidence are not great, and tracking breaks easily if you move your hands too quickly or the camera can’t see them clearly.

Prototype01 showed me that these limitations are real and can be frustrating, but also that 1) they can be largely mitigated in code (e.g. smoothing), and 2) are totally worth the incredible experience of manipulating virtual objects in the air with your bare hands.

Oculus has been steadily improving the Quest 2’s hand-tracking via software updates (presumably using better-trained ML models), and I expect this trend to continue. Indeed, Oculus released Hand Tracking 2.0, with big upgrades to confidence and partial-occlusion pose estimation, right after I released Prototype01.

3. Working with ~1000 objects at once is totally feasible.

One of the core tenets of Softspace is that working with ideas spatially will have big benefits over looking at them through a small rectangular window. However, loading and displaying content (text, images, metadata, etc.) in a 3D context presents novel technical and design challenges.

One of these is simply scale: because of perspective, a spatial UI makes it possible for you to see many more things at once than on (even a very large) 2D display. Loading, managing, and rendering that many objects could prove difficult for the underclocked XR2 chip on the Quest 2.

Prototype01 gave a me a lot of comfort that even for scenes with ~1000 items, load times and performance would be workable. (I took 1000 as shorthand for “many”, because it’s well beyond the number of objects you can really hold in your head at once.)

✅ Loading this many items from the Dropbox API happened quickly enough that there was always new stuff for you to look at by the time you finished visually scanning what had already loaded—analogous to not having to wait for the bottom of a webpage to load in.

✅ The CPU and GPU were able to load and render this many textured objects at 90fps quite comfortably, in large part because of extensive optimizations I had developed for SoftspaceVR.

✅ On top of rendering everything, Prototype01 also runs an unoptimized force-directed graph simulation on two worker threads. Thanks to the wonderful Unity Jobs system and Burst math compiler, these calculations take ~6ms for 1000 bodies, fitting comfortably in the 11ms frame time budget.

Having the performance headroom to load, animate, and render hundreds of objects in 3D space opens up powerful possibilities for new and better ways to work with your knowledge graphs.

User Feedback

Many of you also took the time to download and try out Prototype01—thank you! 🙏🏽

Here some of the key pieces of feedback I received:

• The force-directed graph was a visually interesting way to explore Dropbox, but the fact that everything was positioned somewhat randomly and automatically limited its usefulness. Manually created layouts are slower to create, but are more meaningful. Taking time to figure out where everything goes is part of the work.

• A lot of people wanted to be able to add, delete, move, and otherwise make changes to the files and folder structure.

• People also wanted to link items as a way of denoting a connection between two ideas, as opposed to representing a folder structure relationship.

• The low reliability of the tracked-hand interactions tripped people up—I’ll continue to work on this. I’ve already upgraded both Prototype01 and 02 to the new Hand Tracking package, which should help greatly with this issue.

• Nobody mentioned any problems with the passthrough, which I take to be a general consensus that it is indeed “good enough”.

Thanks again to everybody who downloaded and tried Prototype01, and thanks to all for reading this update!

I’ll be getting back to work on Prototype03 now. More on that soon.

Best,

Yiliu

This is the second in a series of prototypes we’re releasing as a part of our open development process to build the augmented reality version of Softspace.

Help us invent a powerful new kind of tool for thought by 🧑🏽‍🔬 trying these prototypes, 🐦 following us on Twitter, and 👯‍♀️ joining the Softspace Discord.

🎁 Get Prototype02 for free

👯‍♀️ Join the Softspace Discord

Prototype02 is all about writing.

Specifically, I wanted to prove that it's possible to write comfortably, productively, and enjoyably inside a passthrough augmented reality app.

Motivation

Writing might not seem like the highest-priority task for a spatial computing app. In fact, the idea of writing while wearing a headset might strike a lot of people as unnecessary—or silly!

After all, spatial computing’s great appeal is in 3D content, right? All the cool stuff you see in the Oculus ads involve zooming through outer space or tearing zombies apart with your bare hands. Isn’t using this tech to work with text a huge waste of its unique potential?

Also, there’s nothing terribly broken about existing ways of writing. Quite the contrary: a modern laptop running a well-designed text editor is a highly optimized writing machine. It epitomizes a near-universally-embraced paradigm. Why mess with success?

The thing is: the ability to work with text is critical for almost any serious productivity workflow—even ones centered on 3D content. From object names, to short annotations, to entire paragraphs, text is everywhere. Natural written language still plays an irreplaceable role in representing many of the ideas that we need to work with, regardless of domain or medium.

I wanted to tackle writing head-on and de-risk it before prototyping other aspects of SoftspaceAR. This isn’t to say that the writing experience needs to be perfectly on par with that of your MacBook (although I made some interesting discoveries about the advantages of writing in a headset; more on that below). It just needs feel good, and not get in your way when you want to do it.

I decided on a fast and dirty metric of success: Could I write for one solid hour in the prototype?

I initially thought about setting additional qualifying criteria, like word count, or some vague notion of writing quality. But after trying the first few development builds, I realized that the one-hour criterion implicitly covers a lot. It’s painful to write for that long if you feel like you’re going too slowly, or that you’re producing garbage.

Just to be clear: I don’t expect that people will really sit and write for hours on end in SoftspaceAR. It’s more likely that you would write shorter bits of text, sporadically, while working with other content. But I’m using “write for a solid hour” as a close proxy for “good for real writing”.

Mechanics

To write, you need something to write with, and something to write on.

The input part was an easy decision: I’ve tried many, many virtual keyboards, and none are good enough for serious writing. SoftspaceAR will simply require a physical (wireless) keyboard.

As for the writing surface, my goal was to keep it familiar. A naive user coming from a desktop text-editor should be able to pick this up and go. So I went with a simple fixed-width text box that expands downward to accommodate new content, like we’ve all seen a million times before.

I discovered how much we’ve come to take certain textual interactions for granted. I never thought much about these, but it sucks when they’re not available. Some examples: clicking on the text to position the caret (the flashing vertical line that tells you where you’re typing); click-dragging to select text; copy-paste; moving the caret around with the arrow keys.

Happily, most of these interactions are already beautifully implemented in the text-rendering package I use, TextMesh Pro for Unity:

Finally, the one “radical” design decision I made was to make the paragraph the object primitive (as opposed to the page). This is inspired by the way that paragraphs work in Notion and LogSeq, and I find this way of structuring documents much better aligned with how I think and work than one where documents are treated as bags of words with occasional line breaks. I wanted to test this out because I think this is how SoftspaceAR is going to treat text objects.

So in Prototype02, hitting the return key creates a whole new text box:

There are still some holes in the UI. For example, you can't use the arrow keys to navigate between paragraphs. I decided not to plug these because they don't prevent a user from achieving the stated goal of the prototype: letting you write comfortably, productively, and enjoyably for one hour.

How do I know?

Because the first draft of this piece was written in an hour in Prototype02:

Discoveries

• Early builds had transparent backings for the text objects, because I assumed that it would be more comfortable being able to see things in the physical space around you even if they were behind a text box. In fact, I found it very hard to focus on writing when I could see through the text box—I guess my brain was overloaded by the conflicting visual information.

  

• Once I solve that issue by making the backings opaque, I was surprised to find how enjoyable it is to write in passthrough AR. I was expecting to have to force myself to switch from writing on the laptop to writing in the headset, but I actually found myself looking forward to settling down in front of a floating text box and just getting my thoughts out in front of me.

• One of the biggest improvements in my ability to write well in Prototype02 didn’t come from the design or code at all. I can’t really touch-type, and on a laptop I look at the keyboard all the time. The resolution on the Quest 2’s passthrough is too low to easily make out the letters on the keys, which basically forced me to figure out which letters are under which fingers. The first few days were really painful because my typing was so slow and error-prone, but by the time I made the above time-lapse video I was typing away like a champ. Crappy passthrough = bug feature!

Takeaways

• Prototype02 met my criterion for success. It took me just over an hour of writing in the headset to get the first draft of this piece (~850 words). It took me another two hours of editing in Notion to get the final draft (~1200 words + images).

• It was really helpful to explicitly define the criterion for success of the Prototype before I set out to build it, because it helped me stay focused and know when to stop. For the next prototype, I’ll consider publishing the criterion for success even before building anything, as a way of “pre-registering” the experiment publicly.

• It took four weeks between the releases of Prototype01 and Protoype02. My goal is to get this down to 2-3 weeks so I can cover lots more ground before starting to pull the various threads together into an MVP. Prototype01 took two months start-to-finish, and each prototype lays groundwork that speeds up the next one, so the general trend is encouraging 🛫.

Thanks so much for reading!

—Yiliu

🎁 Get Prototype02 for free

👯‍♀️ Join the Softspace Discord

This is the first in a series of prototypes we’re releasing as a part of our open development process to build the augmented reality version of Softspace.

Help us invent a powerful new kind of tool for thought by 🧑🏽‍🔬 trying these prototypes, 🐦 following us on Twitter, and 👯‍♀️ joining the Softspace Discord.

Releasing: Prototype01

Today we're releasing Prototype01. It's an augmented reality Dropbox spatializer that you explore with your hands.

Get SoftspaceAR Prototype01

Join the Softspace Discord

Prototype01 implements several intriguing ideas that both our team and users have long wanted to test:

🕸 3D force-directed graphs

🗃 3D folder structure explorers

😎 Passthrough augmented reality

🤲🏼 Controller-less hand-tracked UI

Quick explanation of each below:

Force-directed graphs are an increasingly popular way to visualize information that consists of interconnected nodes. Apps like Roam and Obsidian have recently added them, where they seem marginally useful. But what if you could navigate one in 3D, immersively?

Previous versions of Softspace all had some way to browse a connected Dropbox account from which to import files. But we've often gotten the question: what if the file browser were the entire app, and you stepped straight into your Dropbox?

Augmented reality always made more sense for productivity than full-occlusion VR, but mainstream AR headsets seemed too far away to build for. After playing with the Oculus Passthrough API, I realized even today's crappy passthrough is good enough to build a great app on.

Oculus has also been steadily improving the hand-tracking capabilities of the Quest 2. It's not perfect, but it's already workable, and the steep rate of improvement makes me comfortable committing to a controller-less future for the Softspace interaction paradigm.

Prototype01 combines these ideas into a single research demo.

Try It For Free

0. If you haven't already, get your Quest set up to sideload apps from @SideQuestVR. This is great thing to do in general, because it lets you try out great indie software that isn't available yet on the main Oculus app store.

1. Connect your Quest to your computer and install SoftspaceAR Prototype01 from SideQuest.

2. Open Prototype01 on your Quest. Log into Dropbox using the web browser that appears. Click on the page by holding up your hand and touching your index finger to your thumb. Type by pressing the keyboard with your index fingers.

3. Once you're logged in, navigate to a Dropbox folder that you would like to spatialize. This prototype only loads in image files (jpg, png, etc), and it will load everything in every subfolder, so it's best to select an image-rich folder that not too large (<1000 images).

4. To navigate around, you can "grab" the virtual space by making a fist with one or both hands. One hands is for simple moving, while two hands let you rotate and scale the space.

5. You can also move, rotate, and scale objects. Select them in the same way that you clicked on the web browser: by hovering over them with your hand and touching your thumb and index finger together.

6. The next time you open Prototype01, you'll still be logged into the same Dropbox account, but you'll be able to select another (or the same) folder to spatialize. Alternatively, you can log out of Dropbox to clear your data.

That's it!

If you have any questions or thoughts, please join our Discord and share them with us:

Join the Softspace Discord

To me, augmented reality has always made more sense than virtual reality for general-purpose productivity, because full immersion isn't ideal in many professional settings.

But see-through augmented reality (e.g. HoloLens) is really hard, and a truly mainstream headset built around this tech is still years away. Until recently, I believed that virtual reality was the only viable medium for Softspace for the foreseeable future.

Last summer, Oculus released their Passthrough API. After playing with it for a few days, I was shocked to realize that even today’s crappy passthrough is good enough to build great tools on.

It's a complete game-changer.

There's now a clear path forward for augmented reality software. Today's grainy grayscale passthrough will lead to tomorrow's hi-res low-latency full-color passthrough—which may even prove superior to see-through smartglasses.

The user experience advantages of AR for general-purpose productivity are massive.

One software update suddenly brought mainstream head-mounted AR into existence.

So we're starting work on SoftspaceAR.

Since 2018, we’ve built three major versions of the Softspace VR app, and shipped two. I could not be more proud of the love, energy, and vision that has gone into each.

If there were one thing I could change, however, it would be this: I would have released earlier and oftener, to cover more of the vast possibility space that we face.

Therefore: to build SoftspaceAR, we’re using an open-development model to quickly test a much wider range of ideas than we’ve been able to do before.

Over the coming months, we will release 5–10 prototypes to explore and (in)validate promising ways to harness augmented reality as a medium for thought.

These will be standalone apps that use the same core interaction paradigm, but are otherwise free to start from different points in the product idea maze.

This process is about learning, not polish. I'm aiming to release something every few weeks.

In fact… 🥁🥁🥁

The very first prototype is already here!

SoftspaceAR Prototype01 is an augmented reality Dropbox spatializer you explore with your hands.

Go ahead and get Prototype01 for free, then join our Discord and let me know:

🤔 What you think of Prototype01

🧠 How you'd like to use Softspace

💡 Cool ideas for future prototypes

Get started with SoftspaceAR Protoype01

Join the Softspace Discord

I'll be publishing the prototypes, as well as what we learn from each, on this Substack.

I expect the first few prototypes to be all over the map, the next few to start converging on core underlying principles, and the last ones to build more deliberately on what came before.

At that point we'll be working toward the first release version of SoftspaceAR, which I intend to submit to the official Oculus app store by the end of September.

In short:

We're building an AR version of Softspace in public, and we'd love to have you join us by

🧪 trying out Prototype01

💌 signing up for updates

👯‍♂️ joining our Discord