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Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

That’s an interesting point, never thought about it.

These complicated lenses distorting light from all directions look fancy in a designer portfolio, having them almost everywhere… I’m not sure how it will work out.

In contrast, the original material design was quite intuitive, iirc they based their design on paper sheets, much simpler, and much more common in our day to day life.

I still have some hope it will work out great, if Apple can take the accessibility visibility issues seriously, and developers using it in moderation, it can be great.

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I see no way around all that optics physics not sucking up computation and battery. Perhaps Apple will add liquid glass silicon to the mix to do that physics in hardware. Using glass to compute glass, LOL

my initial thought is that apple is preparing to launch physically deforming screens which will create bumps similar to this liquid.

I remember finding this super cool when it first came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0

I'm not sure I'd want that on my daily devices, however I would like this on my car heads-up unit where tactile feedback with actual buttons is preferred to keep the eyes on the road. At least that would be better than nothing.

I wouldn't want it on my daily devices either, but mainly because I prefer my touchscreens to be perfectly flat and durable glass.

Or using cameras to render what’s behind the phone as a background. That would help explain the continued focus on thinness.

The continued focus on thinness betrays a lack of useful ideas... a hallmark of the Jony Ive school of enshittification.

Then it would make no sense to simulate them.

Unless you want the same look on your non-tactile and tactile surfaces.

But I think the theory is too far-fetched.

Physically tactile would change my opinion about Liquid Glass. And it would make screens more usable for the visually impaired.

Liquid glass can't possibly be that much more expensive than vibrancy (if it even is). The refraction effects are effectively just a displacement map (probably calculated realtime, but still).

Paper sheets do not have controls on them. That's why "Material Design" sucks too, as all does the rest of the "flat" design fad.

Minimal visual cues, analogous (not photo-faithful) to real-world physical objects made GUIs a revolutionary advance in computer use. Both flat design and this new Apple junk (which, let's face it, is a return to hated and nonsensical skeuomorphism) ignore the very concepts that made GUIs so usable.

The linked video gives the explicit human interface guideline of don’t use it everywhere.

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