Here is an interesting 2.5D experiment for those who like the canvas approach. I'm pretty sure it could have some practical applications. https://twitter.com/OrionReedOne/status/1784871153787420920

One of my favorite follows!

I believe @Orion Reed stops by from time to time if you have any questions.

Indeed! I really need to spend a lot more time here, the limited history of Slack gives me mild anxiety for some reason though. Happy to answer any questions!

I'm curious if you've figured out something hard-hittingly useful to do with this sense of depth. I feel like showing proximity and history are squarely neat but sort of solutions in search of problems. To be clear — I'm 1000% in favour of trying stuff for the sake of it. I'm just wondering what findings you've found thus far. (This stuff is surely also super early / under-explored, so I'm not expecting any grand revelations beyond what you shared in the tweet/masto threads)

Definitely under explored, came up with the idea yesterday… Two things that stand out so far are making larger topologies legible, when you have edges/connections to things further away, you can really “see” that distance with the edge visualisation. The second is similar, where you gain a sense of context beyond the viewport, like “oh there’s a cluster of shapes to my left… I have a bunch of ideas I wanna try, I think there’s some potentially quite useful stuff among the neat-ness

The "best" (or maybe, "most") idea I've had for using depth in an otherwise 2d canvas is in the context of visual programming, as a way to represent different levels of abstraction. That is, things further behind the current plane are functions / subroutines / whatever that stuff on the current plane can call into. So in the context of node-wire, you can have wires between things on the same plane, or wires that go inward representing the invocation of some function defined elsewhere. You don't necessarily need to see those abstractions in full granularity, either. They can be fogged or blurred (like depth of field).

The other notable thing about depth is that it’s made legible through motion, so it might naturally be suited to information which is relevant when navigating — I think your “level of abstraction” example is good, as you often care about that when looking at multiple things, wanting to compare them in some way

Was thinking about motion today and thought if this thread. Frames with changing opacity is a nice way to visualize the past and the future (bret victor style). This is psuedo-design but you can imagine some system that could enable/disable shadows of the future, past, or both. Using a high numbers of frames making smooth gradients and using lower numbers both seems interesting. Could also imagine color delineating past v future if both are enabled. Very interesting thread to pull.