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About 10 - 15 years ago I did some tests, animations done in After Effects mostly, showing some UI concepts that used motion blur, depth of field, translucency,

About 10 - 15 years ago I did some tests, animations done in After Effects mostly, showing some UI concepts that used motion blur, depth of field, translucency, parallax, etc. I wanted to play around with non-planer surfaces, but at the time you couldn't do anything like that in After Effects. I paid absolutely no attention to how "expensive" any of it was in terms of processing. I was interested in exploring possibilities. Some of the effects were pretty amazing, it seemed to me. Depth of field control particularly so. At the time I couldn't drum up _any_ interest. Even as a purely intellectual curiosity. Several people were actually hostile to the whole concept.

205guy 12y ago
What is depth of field in a UI? Is that something like I describe in my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7881182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7881182)?
- commieneko 12y ago
  Depth of field is the area in front of a camera where objects are in focus. Objects closer or farther are out of focus in some proportional manner. In some tests I'd define a 3D camera with a specific depth of field that matched the distance to the object I wanted to be in focus. Say I had an array of view ports onto documents, processes, or images, the one selected would come forward to the focal distance and be in sharp focus. I tried using the effect both coupled and decoupled with actual distance. To me, simply blurring the element without having the effect being tied to distance did not seem nearly as effective. I also played around with having selected, but not active objects coming forward of focus. I also did some tests with "constellations" of documents connected by lines. The lines could indicate a path, a hierarchy, connectiveness, or dependency. The browser would allow you to spin the viewpoint, zoom into and out of groupings. Depth of field here, as well as aerial perspective (greying and blueing far away objects) made for a very nice effect, and seriously improved navigational awareness. These were all animations, not actual interactive demos. Very exploratory in nature. Never got enough interest to go deeper into it.

205guy 12y ago

What is depth of field in a UI? Is that something like I describe in my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7881182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7881182)?

commieneko 12y ago
Depth of field is the area in front of a camera where objects are in focus. Objects closer or farther are out of focus in some proportional manner. In some tests I'd define a 3D camera with a specific depth of field that matched the distance to the object I wanted to be in focus. Say I had an array of view ports onto documents, processes, or images, the one selected would come forward to the focal distance and be in sharp focus. I tried using the effect both coupled and decoupled with actual distance. To me, simply blurring the element without having the effect being tied to distance did not seem nearly as effective. I also played around with having selected, but not active objects coming forward of focus. I also did some tests with "constellations" of documents connected by lines. The lines could indicate a path, a hierarchy, connectiveness, or dependency. The browser would allow you to spin the viewpoint, zoom into and out of groupings. Depth of field here, as well as aerial perspective (greying and blueing far away objects) made for a very nice effect, and seriously improved navigational awareness. These were all animations, not actual interactive demos. Very exploratory in nature. Never got enough interest to go deeper into it.