Neumorphism is more than UI
Early PS: A design trend broke this year, and got named Neumorphism, the new Skeuomorphism
Many have argued that with voice-assisted systems in the future, we won’t need UI, we will just speak to our devices, and many more that in the eventual future, we communicate telepathically with our devices and need no form of interface, much less a visual one.
But people don’t only need information, they enjoy to watch beautiful presentations, exactly why Tony Stark, who has all the tech we can imagine, diagnoses his suit issues by rendering a hologram of its internals. Not telepathically scanning the information and finding the fault. The writer, I suppose, agrees that this won’t connect to what we would love to do if we were Tony Stark, in my opinion even with telepathic interfaces finally arriving, we imagine browsing the internet in real experience presentations, rotating 3D holographic elements, like how we see it in the movies, navigating a real space.
We have had AR, VR, and more realities lately. So what’s real in the virtual world? I define this to be palpable, limitless and predictable.
In real world, palpable things can be touched, and felt, (Nerd alert) In physics, being felt is them exerting a reaction force on our fingers. To perceive an experience as palpable, it reacts to our actions, In Material Design, the ripple effect attempts this, when we tap, but the effect is hardly associated to the action since the list item is not expected to be a water surface.
With the current procedural operating systems, and apps, we are still far from limitless, we are constrained by procedure, displays, pixels.
A friend of mine hates background music in movies, laughter in rom-coms too, he told me these things take him out of the reality of the movie and remind him that it’s not real. Now I asked him about subtitles and he said the same, these three are not predictable, No one expects laughter to be moving around with people in real life or music without a source, same with floating words, they force us to define exceptions for these environments, and hence in our heads categorise them as not real. Our current interfaces are basically floating words. We have no real environment definition for this, we just make an exception, and categorise them as unreal.
Neumorphism is a start on this three-part journey, by being palpable, The switches, sliders and buttons, feel like they are being touched, and the surfaces are predictable. It is extremely limited, as you might have heard. One article has ruled that it can only be implemented in six styles. And yes, this may be so, because our devices are currently heavily limited, even the palpability is still an effort we make, the protrusions and recessions in the screen we perceive are not even real, the screen is still flat and rigid.
Neumorphism is a start on a future of real experiences.
