Welcome to the development diary for makkintosshu’s project Hyouden.

What is Hyouden?

A three-dimensional, collaborative, distributed, scalable, operating system/user interface in which classic two-dimensional and command-line user interfaces are not lost. Not necessarily virtual reality, but a more intuitive and natural user interface for modern computers and networks.

Why is Hyouden?

I’ve always been interested in Virtual Reality, nearly as long as I can remember using computers, and then 3D computer games. However, over the years that I spent doing 3D game development I discovered that I wasn’t the one to come up with new gameplay concepts and that games just didn’t seem to have enough educational and utilitarian merit on their own.

I started to lean towards tech demos as they were atleast just a piece of artwork and only had to show off an effect and try to convey a meaning, but even that was little more than a way to challenge myself when writing 3D graphics effects. It wasn’t enough of a motivator to really push myself to excel.

I’ve also studied Graphical User Interfaces as long as I’ve admired the potential of Virtual Reality (I say potential because there will never be appropriate hardware until there is a popular medium that requests and potentially requires it). My favorites are (note that I’m a Mac user and have been for a very long time) the Mac OS, the BeOS, NeXTstep, and the Newton OS. Of course, I got started on the Internet using a 300-9600 baud modems connecting to BSD servers, so I’m still inclined to have that command line available underneath it all.

Although I still prefer Mac OS X for my desktop operating system, I find that it, like nearly all other operating systems/user interfaces, has gotten too bloated in the past number of years. I yearn for an operating system that is as clean and balanced as the earlier implementations of the Mac OS, BeOS, and NeXTstep, but is more intuitive and is more efficient for today’s uses.

I have always tended to agree with much that Neal Stephenson wrote in In The Beginning Was The Command Line. That one is often most productive working in the first dimension: a single row of text. The command line. That each dimension adds an extra layer to the puzzle and makes some things more efficient, but others drastically less efficient.

Obviously, one has to memorize a lot of textual commands and their switches and arguments in order to be very efficient via the command line, but one has to clutter their two dimensional desktop/screen to maintain a similar amount of efficiency when working in a modern operating system. Some things can be compensated by small graphics and animations which display more information and can be processed quickly by our brains, but others require digging which takes longer than typing out a quick command.

Adding a third dimension doesn’t seem like it would have any benefits at all since you’re just adding another onion skin around an already more complex system. However, I find that a lot of my thinking is actually done in the third dimension anyway. While I can browse a file tree much quicker (especially using a NeXTstep-like column view) in a two dimensional operating system than via the command line, there are tasks that would be faster in the third dimension (especially in the areas of visualization and mapping).

What’s needed is an operating system/user interface that is designed to balance the four dimensions (time, after all, must be taken into consideration) and make the user interface more intuitive than current options.

I’d like to take a crack at it.