This is a design exercise, not a product. And as a design exercise, I think it really nicely demonstrates the author's ability to think of radically new designs, even if I'm not convinced by many of them.
In grad school, my advisor told me: I can't teach you to have interesting ideas, I can only teach you which ones to pursue. It's ok to have lots of bad ideas, because that's the first step to having a few good ones. As for the author, I am impressed.
While the design is new and cool, I wouldn't call "radically new". It puts together designs that exist in different contexts.
Panels are already used by tiling WM (and I believe recent versions of Android as well). Scrolling though apps with a three-finger swipe already exists too (I have an extension for Firefox for Android that does this to change tabs, it's a nice feature)
Sorting documents by hashtag was done by gmail since its beginning
By that logic, basically nothing is ever new. Almost everything can has bits and pieces decomposed and traced back to something else. At the end of the day, new ideas come by cleverly combining existing ideas.
In this case, it's mixing eye tracking, tagging system, a side scrolling array of panels.
One thing that I am fully with the author on is that the desktop metaphor is in need of an update. Many of the terms we used to soften the transition from typewriters, pens, paper, and filing cabinets are not going to be relevant for younger generations.
The hourglass had been irrelevant for quite a while when it was (successfully) employed as a UI metaphore. I wouldn't assume pens to become obsolete any time soon, either.
And whereas filing cabinets do fall out of fashion, the metaphore is deeper here - we will always arrange our possessions in some sort of hierarchical structures. Whether it's a filing cabinet at your office, or drawers and cupboards in your kitchen.
This concept is guaranteed to have underlying physical representations, even if some particular use cases will come and go. Not quite so with tagging (suggested by the author as an alternative for folders).
Tags are inherently more abstract. I don't really have a clear-cut, real-life way of associating my possessions with a tag cloud, whereby I could plausibly filter out all the #electric stuff I own, or #healthcare stuff, or both at once etc.
I think the best designs are iterative. I would agree, things are very familiar, but that is how most things gain momentum. I would honestly use this over what I have now, because things seem way more obvious to what I need to do. They are very context aware in which existing OSes are not
I think you are setting up a bit of a straw man argument. The parent comment said "existing designs." While you apparently refuting their statement, you are saying something different by jumping to "existing products." Products and designs are not the same thing.
They are both designs lol, an ipod, iphone, toaster what ever is a design. It is then changed from a design into a physical product. It's the exact same thing as a UX design of a OS, you can turn it into a OS. It's just not fully done yet.
The eye tracking part was pretty radical. I mean, it's starting to get into VR headsets but just for focusing the processing power to an area. Not specific UI interactions like this person posed. That seemed pretty novel to me.
There are lots of UI interactions in AR/VR based on gaze. It’s a top-tier paradigm in Hololens, for example. Personally I find it annoying; I want to concentrate on the content not some button or action zone. Part of the problem is that our eyes don’t work the way we like to imagine, they skip around and look at lots of different things and our brains then synthesise a gestalt view. There is a tendency for our eyes to be pointing more at the things that interest us but not _specifically_, eg at the keyboard, not at a key.
I think it is possible to use gaze as a secondary input in a UI and would love to hear examples of where it has been done because I haven’t seen any yet.
You need gaze tracking when you've got more than 2 displays. When your consciousness thinks the pointer arrow is around the content you intend to interact and your eyesight can't pick it up because it is actually 1920px away to your side it starts to feel confusing than just frustrating.
In grad school, my advisor told me: I can't teach you to have interesting ideas, I can only teach you which ones to pursue. It's ok to have lots of bad ideas, because that's the first step to having a few good ones. As for the author, I am impressed.