Vision Pro will liberate designers

What Augmented Reality means for web design

Welcome to Ethan’s Turtles - I’m Ethan (spoiler) and I write this newsletter to explore the relationship between digital design and culture.

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In case you weren’t aware, Apple released their own foray into the Metaverse on Tuesday, with their flagship Augmented / Virtual Reality headset, Vision Pro.

Resisting the urge to dunk on Apple for this latest release is, truthfully, challenging.

Even the name, Vision Pro, which heavily implies the monetisation of our sense of sight, feels almost too easy to write some witty remarks over. Too easy to contribute to the swell of hate and doom that, like clockwork, floods our digital news channels on each new, noteworthy release by a big tech company.

Now, I’m all for hate and doom. I do think it’s generally warranted when considering the exorbitant power and questionable strategies (from the perspective of the average person and planet) the largest tech companies possess. I’m just not sure anyone needs my addition to it in this instance.

So I thought, instead, I’d discuss something positive which could emerge out of a potentially new paradigm of web design.

2D in Augmented Reality

One of the many, many things people have been questioning Apple’s choices over with Vision Pro is the majority of their promotional material demonstrating people using the headset to project normal web browsers and computer applications. Normal, as in the same browsers and applications we use on a computer, just without a monitor to frame them within.

Using Safari with Vision Pro. Source: Apple

The criticism levelled at Apple is: why would we spend above £3,000 for a majority of benefits we already have in a computer?

There’s definitely something to this, but I believe this perspective is only half right.

I think the question ‘why would we continue to use the same software and user interfaces in AR?’ is absolutely valid as a reason not to want the headset at this time.

However, the question ‘why would we continue to use software in two-dimensional space in AR?’ is something I intend to answer now.

When designing applications for the web, there is a major challenge that web designers face when attempting anything innovative or experimental: screen sizes.

When you design for the web, you aren’t designing something once. You are designing something many, many times.

Yes there are phone screens and computer screens, these are the main two. But within these, there are so many variants. Wide and short screens, long and narrow screens, screens that bend, screens that separate.

An experience I continue to have is being sent a photo of my own web app, Clusta, on some utterly bizarre monitor or device that I have neither heard of, nor can find a tangible use or benefit for. Clusta, of course, looks all bent out of shape. And I am left once again working out what logic I can tell the app to behave differently to a new set of specific dimensions.

It’s becoming a common theme in my writing that all web design is becoming progressively similar. I explain here why algorithms influence this, and here why diminishing support for visual design innovation contributes too.

Well, in this article, I want to share that endless screen sizes are another, considerable, contributing factor.

Why experiment, when you can use a styling package or framework which has already accounted for all these arbitrary sizes?

My intention was to discuss an exciting future in this article. But at five-hundred words in, this is feeling a bit negative. Let’s move on to the exciting bit.

Less logistics, more design

Back to our Vision Pro and the Augmented Reality web browser. You might be able to see where I’m going with this.

When you take away the screen, you take away the screen sizes.

When you design a new website, for viewing in Augmented Reality, you really do only have to produce one design. No more endless testing. No more exceptions to your previous work.

When building an experimental, innovative user interface, this is a truly liberating development. From experience, I can tell you that so many hours that could have been spent further refining and developing the innovative interface were instead spent on making the application compatible across screen sizes.

But that’s just for the designers who have continued to dare to innovate at this time. Even more exciting, I would argue, are all the designers who will feel liberated to actually attempt innovating and experimenting with the interfaces they create.

I appreciate this won’t happen tomorrow, and there will likely be a long period where we will have to account for screen sizes alongside Augmented Reality environments like Vision Pro - but the door has been opened, and web designers should start to consider this light at the end of the tunnel.

Ian Bogost, writer for The Atlantic, made a pertinent observation in a recent Tweet:

That end of the quote, on interfaces being the same since the Macintosh, is so important. By shaking up the fundamental, physical boundaries that contain user interfaces, we are for the first time since the Macintosh arriving at a moment where designers can be liberated to push the boundaries of interfaces much further than ever before. And it is inevitable this will happen.

The first part of the quote, however, is also important. Apple has always been a computer interface company. It is, for me, what makes them stand out from the rest of the big tech players.

Their commitment to innovating and developing interfaces has, in my opinion, done more for computers and digital technology than anything else. Because it has continued to expand the scope of who a computer is for, and inspire people to find different ways to use computers.

As a final thought, I will add that what is most exciting here is specifically originating from the technology of Augmented Reality, and not from Vision Pro or Apple specifically.

If you want to support makers in the AR / VR Tech space who aren’t government-sized private companies, I would highly recommend checking out the work of my friends at PlaylabZ CIC who do some amazing work with the technology, and regularly collaborate with Mozilla amongst other organisations.

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Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article, and beyond…