List of random GUI ideas

Some random ideas to try in UIs:

• How about crosshairs instead of a mouse pointer? Boundaries between gradients, maybe, rather than opaque black lines. Your mouse pointer shouldn’t obscure anything, and being able to use it to see the alignment between things is occasionally useful.
• Or maybe crosshairs with a vertical line that only goes down?
• what if the crosshairs are done with some kind of filtering that is subtle enough that you barely notice it when it's not moving. like an edge enhancement kind of filter say.
• circles are a common alternative for indicating a point in some other contexts, like screencasting software and touch ui
• Maybe for 3-D rendering a bit of Lambertian surface bumpmapping would help with adding the illusion of 3-D-ness? If the bumpmapping is bandlimited well below the pixel frequency then visual discontinuities will coincide with depth discontinuities. Perlin noise maybe? Simplex noise? Blue noise? Ambient occlusion might help add depth cues too.
• You can render a sphere as a circle very quickly, but it looks like a disc. If you add an elliptical contour between light and dark, though, you can add a lot of spherishness very quickly. Spheres have some merits compared to triangles as 3-D primitives.
• Directly highlighting depth discontinuities with edge features (black lines, white lines, Gabors, sincs, whatever) might also improve rendering legibility.
• This NeRF stuff produces really impressive 3-D renderings. Can some kind of sparse representation of a radiance field be useful for user interfaces too?
• What does a UI for guiding heuristic A*-like search through an exponentially large search space look like?
• when exploring a search space covering orders of magnitude through manual dimensional search, maybe you can have buttons for ½×, 2×, 10×, .1×, etc., each accompanied by a preview of the variables of interest there. iphone software often displays the previews as the background of the buttons, also handy for things like choosing color palettes.
• what would a ui scripting language look like. like, something for easy exploration of different ui dynamics, like a simple game scripting language for ui components. how can we minimize the time between coming up with a ui idea and trying it out on yourself.
• low-ui-budget software i see screencasts of on youtube (optistruct, notepad plus plus, abaqus, matlab, origamizer, etc.) is mostly a fairly small number of ui components that look straight out of win95. pulldown menus, dockable buttonbars, radio buttons with black dots inside white circles, checkboxes, gray backgrounds everywhere, accelerators, buttons, tab panels, a status line along the bottom of the window, dropdowns, dialog boxes, text fields, scrollbars, occasionally a slider or spinbutton. one thing that's surprisingly common is a tree control in the left pane. i suspect that a lot of this is stuff that people find very familiar by now and so departing from it should be done with care. even tinkercad has a fair bit of this feeling even though it's in the browser. catia definitely has its own look but it still has win95-style comboboxes with the little downward-pointing isosceles right triangle on a gray embossed button and shitty little toolbars around the viewport and shitty opaque gray dialog boxes full of forms.
• one way that a lot of this software is kind of nice is that they often display what could be tooltips in the status bar.
• meshmixer is a little nicer looking by virtue of, among other things, translucency, fewer larger buttons with labels, and more visual texture and gradients. ambient occlusion just about shows up in its clicky gui. prusaslicer also uses translucent overlays (with sparklines even) in the corners of the main viewport to good effect, and does the smae kind of thing with some dialog boxes. fusion 360 of course overlays its tree view on the left side of the viewport with cracks but not much translucency.
• iphone software often overlays text labels for buttons in a popup menu over the main viewport, so the (often translucent) buttons on the menu minimally obscure the main viewport. though this kind of text overlaying thing wouldn't be very useful if what's in the main viewport is actually text, in which case reflowing it to miss the menu would be more useful.
• also typically instead of radio buttons iphone software has a slidy switch thing with a circle that can slide to different positions in the radio button group.
• a common fui trope is to put statusbarry things in folder-tab-like things with 45° angles protruding onto the main viewport. also of course in fui everything is transparent, blue, and circular.
• slight delays between animating multiple items are common in modern chi prototypes and break up the appearance of solidity, reinforcing the multiplicity of objects
• graying out the background when a pie menu or similar modal pops up is really helpful for focusing attention
• integrating high-res touch surfaces into projected or glasses-displayed ar environments can provide higher-resolution and lower-latency interaction possibilities, though xiao's work has shown that common touch surfaces can't really do any better than depth cameras (5mm or so); you need better-quality touch
• just as sound is the lowest-latency interaction modality, vision is the highest-bandwidth one, and that's underused at present, in part because people aren't chameleons or octopodes. but they can draw. for some reason gesture tracking via camera analysis is still janky and jerky.