I'm not really sold on ZUIs (zoomable user interfaces) but I became a bit more enticed once I realised that you could make ZUIs for graphs instead of trees. Where you can zoom into things and eventually get back to where you started... I feel like (aside from the potential motion sickness) it induces this visceral sense of how software and data topologies are governed by laws that we made up... And that, so long as we don't break any actual physical laws we are free to make up the semantic rules as we please... Anyway, made this zoomable hypertext thing the other day to figure out how you would do infinite zoom in an infinite coordinate space that has this weird graph topology, where you can have

A --inside-> B --inside-> A

Ended up with what I called a Shifting-Origin Graph which has a series of matrix transforms that can traverse through the graph with you, keeping floating point precision at bay and keeping memory usage fixed. I would be curious to hear takes on ZUIs here, I feel like there's a more general view on them that would be more compelling to me, I got a glimpse of that as I made this experiment, realising that it would open up some interesting semantics that aren't really to do with ZUIs, and more to do with the ability to warp space in new ways.

interesting, software systems that support circular imports have this structure, and you do want to traverse to dependencies sometimes

amazing ... def checking it out checkout this demo of Xanadu ... I think ZUI was a part of it

It's very weird but I can't think of any natural analogue for infinite zoom. I mean this in evolutionary / cognitive sense - an object that could exist at arbitrary scale, or an experience where "infinite zoom effect" would happen naturally. We perceive the world around us at several different scales - from a couple kilometers to ~100s of micrometers. Different scales carry different significance for us. Objects around us help us navigate while small things can be acted upon. Infinite zooming mixes those two categories. This can be used to make interfaces that smoothly switch between being an object in our hands and our surroundings. It's really cool and can be slightly confusing but it's probably still way more intuitive than "page by page" navigation. I also have a feeling that the infinite zoom UI is using the same neural pathways as 3D navigation actually. So arranging the "doors" horizontally might reduce the confusion and make it easier to navigate.

Screens! Hey Orion

(screens in screens in screens in screens)

I'm a "leverage human familiarity with physical 3D reality" kind of person. So for me the only way ZUIs could be natural and not disorienting is if they were designed to look and work like 3D perspective.

@Marek Rogalski could it be “as above , so below“ the infinite recurring pattern in nature , fractals , Fibonacci etc…?

Oh yeah - fractals appear in plants! That could make a nice metaphor for ZUI.

But still, as I say, humans don't normally spend a significant proportion of their everyday productive waking existence zooming into and out of Romanesco broccoli with a magnifying glass, or spotting Fibonacci patterns in their shopping lists..!