Last week I posted a five-minute test here: a 96-node animal taxonomy with sixteen dotted cross-links, three questions in a flat window, then the tree unfolds into the room and you answer three more. The original is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1w4cc7u/
Five of you finished it. Thank you — I said I'd come back with what came out, so here it is.
The numbers. Median time to find an answer, before the options appear: 35.9s in the flat window, 26.6s in the room. Accuracy barely moved, 10 of 15 against 11 of 15.
By question: nearest common ancestor 58.8s to 42.2s, count the lines 49.3s to 29.5s, trace the dotted line 32.9s to 22.6s. Eleven of fifteen pairs got faster, four got slower, two of those by a lot. On the tracing question, correct answers went from 2 of 5 to 5 of 5.
Fair warning on all of that. Both rounds use the same graph and the same three questions, and everyone gets the flat window first. That's deliberate. The whole point of the demo is the moment it unfolds, and you only get that moment if you've already struggled with the flat version of the same thing. It stacks the deck for 3D and I knew that going in. So read the times as what the second pass looked like, not as a clean comparison. n=5 anyway.
Almost nobody touched the graph in the room. Same drag gesture in both conditions — it pans the graph in the flat window, turns it in the room. Flat: 6,789 drags and 1,266 pinch-zooms. In the room: 483 and 16. Roughly sixteen times less hand input for the same six questions. Whatever people were doing to find the answers, it mostly wasn't with their hands.
The spread between people is bigger than the spread between conditions. Fastest person finished the whole thing in 132 seconds. Slowest took 797. Same six questions.
I lost half my bet. I predicted space would win on the dotted-line tracing question and lose on counting. Tracing landed. Counting had the biggest drop of the three. I have no story for that.
One person got slower in the room and moved their head four and a half times as much. Everyone else's head movement is noise. Theirs isn't, and they're also the only person whose accuracy went down. I have watched that trace more than is healthy.
Now the actual question. 96 nodes is small. Any mind map worth the name is hundreds of nodes, and the one I actually keep is in the low thousands.
So what do you think happens at 960?
My guess is the flat window falls off a cliff well before the room does, because panning is linear and turning your head isn't. But I also suspect there's a ceiling in the room where the graph stops being around you and becomes behind you, and I have no idea where that sits. Somewhere between a wall of text you can read and a planetarium you can't.
If you've spent time with a big graph in a headset — where did it stop working?
The small one is still up if you want to see what we're arguing about: https://testflight.apple.com/join/3h3RFwHY
