The Mighty Rectangle

For millennia our primary medium for well... everything… has been rectangles.

Stone tablets. Papyrus scrolls. Printed books. TVs. PCs. Smart phones. The rectangle has reigned supreme.

Does Apple Vision Pro have the potential to change our relationship with this mighty shape?

As everyone for the last week has heralded the start of the “spatial computing” era, they’ve also been quick to imagine dynamic 3D interfaces and a “breaking out of the box.”

But one of the most striking parts of the Vision Pro launch and early demos was that… everything was so… rectangular.

Yes, these rectangles escape beyond the confines of the phone or computer, but they’re still largely flat, UI rectangles.

The obvious take is that V1 of visionOS is a bridge. Much like leather-bound skeuomorphism for the early iOS and PCs with literal desktops to help users acclimate to this new interaction model and world. Just as we’ve seen in the past, we should expect this paradigm to break over time.

But the more interesting take is that, even if spatial computing does result in a new platform, we may never ditch the rectangle — that is, we will continue to interact with most content in these rectangles, even if they are beautifully rendered in a digital 3D space.

While this certainly is the more pragmatic future — I think it is also the most likely one — particularly for productivity. And even if Vision Pro (and subsequent versions) are an order of magnitude more successful than any predecessor VR devices, it will pale in comparison to iPhone scale.

And so long as the iPhone still constitutes the center of your digital life — scalable (spatial) rectangles will rule. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t see this as wholly negative.

Yes, there will be immersive 3D experiences, but I wager those will primarily be things that are already 3D in the real world. Experiences like modeling, interacting with objects in a real world manner, or fully immersed backdrops & entertainment.

For everything else... perhaps humans today are just like our cavemen brethren — reasoning with and interacting best with orderly content in two dimensions?