Hi! Welcome to the 150+ people who signed up last week. I’m excited to share this week’s Designing Near Future Newsletter with you.

Here’s the breakdown of what’s in store today

⭐ 1 Shift: How our memories are becoming 3D

⚡ 1 Tip : A design tip to create recognizable design language

💊 3 Resources: Creative resources for taking your work to the next level

⭐ Shift

How our memories are becoming 3D

From shopping to house hunting, chances are you have interacted with 3D objects super imposed in a physical space (Likely Augmented Reality) or simply on a screen ready to be spun around (Likely WebGL).

Infact, Ikea just launched all their 10,000+ products for 3D viewing on Google. An interesting shift I am noticing is the abundance of 3D technology and how it has quietly penetrated our lives without making a big deal around it. Matterport - now a real estate 3D imaging company started back in 2011 with a simple mission to capture the real world in 3D. It’s current net worth is $964.53 million. WTF?

In a 2016 letter, Matt Bell, Co-founder of Matterport wrote “We are building the Google for the physical world, and that will open up a wondrous range of possibilities!”

Fast forward to today, they just launched AI reconstruction, customization and a generative planning model called Genesis. The project will combine Matterport’s property insights with the ability to automatically enhance the design, layout, and utility of a property in dimensionally accurate, photorealistic 3D. Sort of like Dall-E acting on accurate “spatial” data.

Spatial Capturing

Where have you heard “Spatial” before in the last week? Yup, Apple Vision Pro promises capturing spatial memories. I did some research and found that it’s not just 2D screens in a virtual space. If you are developing for the headset, Apple introduced a new kind of window called a Volumetric Window, that allows volumetric items to occupy digital real estate in your environment and field of view.

Spatial memories is a big deal.

Last week, the U.S. Patent Office published two trademark filings from Apple relating to the Apple Vision Pro headset titled "Spatial Memories." While Apple didn't highlight 'Spatial Memories' in their press release, they obviously felt it was a marketing term that they wanted trademarked.

It’s not so much that the Apple headset will drive the 3D memories movement nor the fact that you will be capturing your kid’s first ever footsteps in 3D, wearing $3500 ski goggles, but it is a signal to the industry. An industry that posts 95 million photos and videos on Instagram, 350 million photos on Facebook and far more on Snapchat and Whatsapp EVERY SINGLE DAY!

The signal is a thumbsup 👍 to companies like Insta360 who have been making tools to capture 360 videos affordably while making it more accessible for everyone. Iphone Pros equipped with Lidar are also capable of capturing 3D spatial data. Although not perfect, 3D capturing is becoming cheaper and with AI reconstruction and faster on board computing, capturing your memories in 3D/2.5D is not that far away. 86% of Americans buy phones for their cameras anyway, so it’s safe to say we love capturing memories. Combined with AI, here is a showcase of what 3D avatars from both Apple and Facebook look like.

So what’s the shift?

Our digital memories are going to have another dimension.

But it is going to require a lot of work. This market is unfortunately very scattered. There is not a universally agreed upon workflow or technology to capture 3D memories. You have old players like Panasonic and Fujifilm still trying to pursue stereoscopic capturing. (which btw is also very cool, just not spatial). We have never had a place to share 3D photographs to truly celebrate all it’s dimensions (pun intended). Nor have we had the luxury to throw AI image reconstruction at everything until now. A strong parallel shift to watch out for is the great comeback of VR/AR headsets. Here is a list of new VR products scheduled for this year. Exciting old/new medium to experience 3D memories.

This movement is too small to become a trend. But too big to signal a shift.

Exciting opportunities for building in this space:

1. A phone accessory that allows for capturing of spatial memories. For this to work it needs to be non intrusive, almost like a phone case.

2. A new media platform or an extension that allows sharing of 3D content for social consumption. Meta announced that reels are coming to Oculus headsets this year but it seems like there is more.

3. Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a NeRF-based method to reconstruct 3D scenes from reflections in the human eye. But why? There is an exciting opportunity for designers to implement new technology like this one for meaningful use cases.

What do you think? Will adding an additional dimension to revisit your memories add meaning to capturing photos or will it lead to social collapse like this black mirror episode.

⚡ Tip

Want a strong design language story framework for your product?

Most designers struggle with communicating a comprehensive story around why their concepts look a certain way. Here is a tip that I learned from Sung Jang and Martin Thaler:

“Make one thing more important than everything else.”

Choose a design element, a quality, a detail, a function, a material or a feature as the core narrative of a product. Eg. Macbook’s simplicity, Playstation 5’s sculpted form, Nothing Phone’s transparent materiality, Cyber truck’s rawness.

Whenever anyone describes the product’s appearance, the primary design component should come up first.