https://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_pointing_to_the_...
And more generally, there’s another one: text-based.
Or what about taking a chapter from a textbook and making it into a level in a game? The spatial world would help players to remember and fix things in their memory, and they could always return to review.
Or a game tailored for language learning through real world situations, where a teacher sets up a 'lesson' and then the students bring it to life. Maybe that shopkeeper is a native speaker calling in and playing. The possibilities are endless.
And this sounds amazing; bringing physicality to ephemeral webpages that are here and gone the next moment:
"I could place my personal site on a street near the websites of my friends. We could form a little village. I could then go to my favorite sites and walk around nearby to find sites like them. This is a spatial interface that would give us a new and intuitive way for navigating the Internet and understanding how websites are related each other."
If I'm have one-to-one meeting, I prefer to site face-to-face with other person. Of course with multiple participants this is not possible. Wouldn't it be an example of "bad skeumorphism" if the video conferencing would take these real-life limitations to software? While the grid-of-faces is not natural, it allows you to see everybody at once.
So if you "paint yourself into a corner and want to extend the image one way - you have to select everything, move it, and scale the canvas or the selection aproprietely.
This could be done automatically by the program every time you add new details. The canvas could just as easily be infinite.
The canvas is more of a way to group objects for export, you could resize and duplicate them all over the workspace.
I used to use them as an ad how version control system, duplicate objects to play around off canvas, and then “commit” to a new canvas.
If you are interested in this kind of stuff definitely also research Embodied Cognition theory.
