What if we live without gravity?

Every new user experience is doomed to be built up affected by our previous experience over the past years. We use the floppy disc UI for the icon of ‘save’ function in many of documentation tools. We use the telephone head UI for the icon of ‘call’ function on the mobile screen. Why? Since that usage of familiar metaphor as the future user interface guarantees users to follow.

However, some of UX is fixed as the default not because they are way more familiar to us, but because they are irresitably impossible to be overcomed due to the born-nature constraint. One representative example would be — “gravity”. Gravity! Since the core of earth pulls down every alive and non-alive creatures sticked ‘on’ the floor, All the user experience in our daily life has been archiectected affected by it.

Cars are heading to their destination aligned through the drawn row because the traffic system is architected on the one layer of road, people are walking on the land with free by their feet but not able to reach out to the top of trees, and birds are able to fly around the sky but at some point need a time to get rested on a place because they get tired on their journey being agianst the gravity. Same with airplanes — the human-made birds for the transportation flexibility.

That said, we are using drastically small part of place out of the entire space where are we are living, like the attached drawing below.

However, it’s interesting to think about how these existing gravity-based user experience over the past history will be transformed in the upcoming future with the whole new 3D-based virtually created place that probably will be able to be accessed by an VR hardware device. At this moment figuring out all the detail might be impossible, but pinning point the thinkable areas that might be affected through this unnecessariness of gravity seems fun.

Product displayment — Most of products that have key features in certain stores are displayed on the ‘eye-level’ height because it’s known that where it’s displayed affects to human what to buy, and eye-level displayment is the most proven way to make people get their mind.

Advertisement — Similiar with the above product displayment. Since there becomes no limitation on how to display advertisements (i.g. banners bound up between the trees, paper ads sticked on the doors and windows of buildings, etc.) so many kinds of creative advertisement will emerge.

And, even the view to the world — What I’ve thought most anticipating is that we won’t need to just strolling around a single space parted in the place we are physically existing, but will get able to see the overview of forest, cities, and the countries because we can go up as high altitude as possible without any limitation of gravity. I think this accesibility of space that enable us see the wide view of the world will give us more broadened options to choose where we live, where I go, things like that — Because we can actually ‘see’ all the options.

Thank you for reading this! I will come back with another fun ‘what if’ topics that we might face in upcoming future days. Stay tuned!