This reduces the scientist or designer to some small cog in the machinery, to the point where they are further alienated from their work.
Remove the scientist and replace them with an algorithm doing some poor facsimile of gradient descent for some protein energy metric. Or make it multiplayer where some crowd is doing the depth first search. No individual.
The only analogy I can think of is cooking. You can reduce all of the steps into a checklist, which can be optimized, but instinct is still the differentiating factor. Or rather, taste.
Maybe this helps designers develop taste better, but imo the interface is not the problem. It's training scientists to have better sense of taste or smell. There's a dimension above all of this that is still yet to be tapped.
I am not in the field but I just felt trapped by the whole thing. To me it appears to be skeuomorphic design to the nth degree. Why would you create an entire system of artifacts in the real to replace something you could do more flexibly with higher resolution and better visualization in CAD?
Like if these were real processes you were doing in the lab and they were somehow being captured more accurately or efficiently, I could see that perhaps making sense.
But this just seems like extra steps and the novelty is you’re working on a table. It feels claustrophobic somehow.
In regards to the specific UI concern around it feeling claustrophobic, I can see that but I feel like there are many use cases where focus via constraints is very useful. Analyzing abstract ideas into a real thing can be powerful at helping humans see the connections and hidden relationships that are sometimes difficult to see in the digital realm.
That is essentially the AR value proposition in it's entirety in my opinion. Meeting the human experience half way, so we can use our immense spatial reasoning skills in an environment that supports them.
I've seen molecular chemists and biologists (and even for a weird set of 3d shapes mathematicians) experiment with physical stuff before transferring the ideas elsewhere - the tactile aspect and the ability to intuitively rotate a 3d shape while visually perceiving it directly rather than as a translation of something else can be a really helpful tool for thought, so snap together molecule sets seem to be a pretty common posession - perhaps it'll never catch on amongst younger scientists but I can certainly see practitioners who're currently, say, 30-35+ getting a blast out of using it at least sometimes.
I think spatially, which I 1) did not recognize that I was doing for a long time, and 2) thought was much more common than it is.
For years I tried to figure out why my short term memory seemed so good even though I'm neuroatypical in a way that's usually associated with reduced working memory. Turns out I've been building mind palaces basically for longer than I can remember, but not with images, which is why none of the descriptions ever resonated for me. Mind palaces with a blindfold on, if you will.
Being able to rotate items in my brain sure came in handy as a bike mechanic. I'm also handy in a move when you have one box that won't fit in your car/truck. But it also led to arguments with my father about whether I was turning a bolt the wrong way, when wrenching a bolt that is on the back side of something.
I can't really visualize complex shapes in 3D and so molecular graphics (like pymol) is really important to me. Even in other areas, like math shape viz (which I do for "fun") and various other 3D modelling, it's really key that I have a quick way of assembling things and rotating them around.
I dunno, now you’ve got a bin of parts to store, and what happens if they get lost or damaged? You order more and wait for shipping? Print more and have grad students glue magnets in? The mean-time-to-kitchen-drawer seems low.
I wonder if someone needs to better introduce the SpaceMouse to this crowd.
One would anticipate the people who've already owned snap together molecule sets for years have either already figured out a good way to make sure a bin of parts stays where it's put or accepted that it's their fate to order more of things sometimes.
Similar to teaching yourself to always put tools back in the toolbox immediately after use lest they go for a walk, really.
I mean, I do see your point about -you- not wanting to deal with a bin of parts, I'm not sure I would either - but for the people who've already encountered that problem and found a way to deal with it that works for them, it doesn't seem like it'd be an obstacle.
I guess that answers it for me and seems to reinforce it is strongly skeuomorphic — it isn’t really possible to have a box of aminos/proteins in the same way you can have a box of Hs Os and Cs. They wanted a box of parts and this is the closest thing.
I have another take on this but I think we end up at the same place.
Someone once said that Civilization is defined by our ability to think in the abstract.
Scientists spend most of their time thinking in the abstract. Philosophers too. Designers and teachers are translators from the abstract to the real and back, or at least the good ones are.
Giving scientists 'tools' that reduce abstract thought is a crutch, that when overused will lead to injury.
I don't think that's who Bret is targeting, but if it is I hope he goes back to his first principles soon and doesn't end up where many of us are, working to create something and finding we contributed to the creation of something a lot darker.
This reduces the scientist or designer to some small cog in the machinery, to the point where they are further alienated from their work.
Remove the scientist and replace them with an algorithm doing some poor facsimile of gradient descent for some protein energy metric. Or make it multiplayer where some crowd is doing the depth first search. No individual.
The only analogy I can think of is cooking. You can reduce all of the steps into a checklist, which can be optimized, but instinct is still the differentiating factor. Or rather, taste.
Maybe this helps designers develop taste better, but imo the interface is not the problem. It's training scientists to have better sense of taste or smell. There's a dimension above all of this that is still yet to be tapped.