I can’t get over touchscreens.

I can’t get over the move they made; the pivot — not in a Silicon Valley sense, but in a basketball-player-pivoting-toward-a-shot-sense. Touchscreens really made a move, a full step beyond the mouse and cursor, a move so foundational that I can’t get over it.

It’s about degrees of separation, right?

Mouses and cursors are a delightful thing. You, the lumbering mammal, push this hunk of plastic across a desk. Above that desk, on another, more ethereal plane, a cursor moves in perfect sync. There’s magic there, in the synchronicity. It feels good to use. It feels very close to direct.

But it’s not direct.

Touchscreens took that whole thing a quantum leap forward. They removed a degree of separation: now, you’re not moving the thing that moves the thing. You’re just moving the thing. With your own fingers. The same way you move other, real-er, stuff.

This pivot is profound, and it wasn’t easy. It took more than just the technology — on its own, multitouch was a gimmick. It took things like the way a scrollable view “bounces back” when you reach the end, or the way pinching on a thing expands it, as if it were a real, malleable material that could be stretched at will.

It took all of that. No one part is more important than the others. If you lose any of it — the tech, the bounce-back, the pinch, the Frames Per Second — you lose the whole thing.

Touchscreens. Multitouch. The iPhone.

When I say those words you’re thinking of technology or devices. But I’m thinking of a sea change in degrees of separation. Software is no longer a thing I use other tools to interact with. It’s the thing I interact with, the same way I interact with a sink full of dirty dishes so we can have dinner tonight.

If you want AR to happen, we need a similar sea change.

You can see the pieces lining up. The tech is nearly there, and shrinking every year. The UI ideas are doing that healthy thing where they pull from the past, but also let the future run wild. It’s all very untamed. That’s good. We have the ideas, the tech, and even the direction.

But we could use some conviction.

Somebody needs to be like the person who said “on the iPhone, every scrollable view will bounce back when you reach the end. Every single view. That way it feels like the thing you flicked had momentum, heft, and weight. That way it feels real.”

Somebody needs to be that person — but about AR.

Somebody needs to be the person who says: “When you let go of a piece of software (any piece of software) it falls. Every single time. That way it feels like the thing you let go of had weight, physicality, and an obedience to gravity. That way it feels real.”

Or maybe it’s: “When you nudge a piece of software with your finger, it slides across the surface it’s on — with friction and resistance. Every single time. That way it feels like the piece of software is present, and predictable; less like the future and more like a vase.”

Or even: “When we’re designing objects to add to a person’s living room, they can’t all look like capital-d Design Objects. They need to be varied, but down-to-earth; less Design Milk and more end-caps-at-Target. That way they can be part of a home.”

I’m not sure gravity is the thing, for what it’s worth. I’m not sure friction or aesthetics are, either. And there’s no reason to think it’s just one thing anyway: multitouch has pinch-to-zoom, bounce-back-on-scroll, swipe-to-unlock, and more.

In the same way quantum physicists can compare their model of the universe to experimental results and go, “yeah, something is missing here,” we should be able to look at the current AR interaction model and wonder: what else? What’s missing?

Because I am sure of this:

We’re never moving back a degree. We’re never moving back from directly manipulating software. Take all your ideas that aren’t that, and throw them out. Direct manipulation is table stakes.

The question for us is: what comes after that?