Week 3: Draggable

After writing about waiting for my Apple Vision Pro last week, I’ve since spent a lot of hours using spatial computing, enough that my body has requested me to please stop. Thoughts on that fascinating but overstimulating and nonsensical device aside, the concept of spatial computing I find compelling. Using visionOS is like having an infinite number of scalable iPads in the room around you. The core interaction of the OS, as I wrote last week, is about dragging & resizing windows—just like we’re used to on a Mac—in the 3D, augmented space around you. The windows are each interactive yet draggable.

Bringing us to this week’s creation: the minimum viable spatial “OS” for the web. (Read-only websites don’t count as OSs.) Using a whole lot of fancy CSS, I’ve recreated some core UI details of visionOS.

Try the demo – read the source code

The main welcome panel keeps it simple, showing off the glass material visionOS uses for lighting and the interactive drag handle underneath.

Safari uses our good old friend, <iframe>. While challenging the size correctly, this app was pretty straightforward and JS-free. It uses the nested corner radius trick to have a consistent border around the web content.

Photos is a vertically-scrolling photo gallery. In addition to Next.js’s blur-up image loading, it uses Artur Bien’s “blur vignette” CSS technique to recreate Apple’s spatial photos visual effect, without the depth. (You’ll notice this on the page backdrop too, since visionOS has a limited field of view plus foveated rendering, so the edges of the displays aren’t sharp.) I grabbed photos of projects from the IMA floor over the years.

The dragging interaction is powered by Framer Motion’s Reorder API, which I’d never noticed before. It intercepts the JavaScript drag events and turns them into smooth CSS transforms. But I wanted to add the depth effect, which needed transform too…which would require rewriting the Reorder component. But then I remembered the new rotate CSS property, which when combined with perspective on the parent drag container, can create a depth effect. The end solution is elegantly concise:

.window {
  transition: 0.125s rotate ease-in-out;
  &:first-child {
    rotate: y 25deg;
  }
  &:last-child {
    rotate: y -25deg;
  }
}

The drag handles are CSS pseudo-elements on the windows with a quick transition on them.

The CSS uses CSS Modules this week, instead of Tailwind. Tailwind is great for more consistent content-based sites, but when you need crazy CSS effects, you can’t beat the regular syntax. I used PostCSS’s env plugin to use CSS Nesting with better backwards compatibility.

If I spent more hours on this, I’d make the windows resizable—a major geometric plus interaction design challenge—and add a full app switcher view, the option to have more windows, etc.