Attention Focusing Effects

In order to enhance and continue the trend in SL interface style, I suggest attention focusing effects during actions like highlighting text for edit and perhaps for the appearance of each character in chat and notecard and script entry.

Each time a new character appears while typing, a character image could move from our avatar's fingers, on our display, or from an icon of a keyboard in the sky on the recipients display, with a flashing orange outline around it and a cone of context shadow fading in and fading out connecting the arriving character with the area it is entering.

Characters would enter the area they are headed for from the side opposite where they need to be displayed at, giving their orange outline the maximum amount of time possible for flashing, as well as reducing the load on the servers imposed by entering text at a normal rate. These outlines should undulate and pulse a bit to help make sure that the user is aware of the extremely important arrival of the newly typed character.

If the user moves the cursor over the character as it finds its way to its final destination, a tooltip with the character itself as the message would appear, so if one moved the cursor over an "e", a tooltip would appear that says, "e", and below that it should also say "Ctrl-[ for previous tab" and " Ctrl-] for next tab". Actually the words "Ctrl-[ for previous tab" and " Ctrl-] for next tab" should just be permanently placed below whatever cursor is displayed at any time or action. Some folks might not know what a cursor is, so the cursor itself should have a tooltip sticking out of it that says "Cursor".

Hmm.... if every interface element had tooltips displayed constantly, users eye might get used to that and learn to ignore them, so instead every element of the interface should still have tooltips displayed, but each tooltip should flicker and do animated motions like backflips while singing their messages and also displaying their messages with little bitty semaphore flags.

Pulsating orange outlined semaphore flags that emit particles.

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I realize the above suggestions may seem fanciful and extremely undesirable to most users but I'm applying for a position on the LL interface team so I'm using this post to explore ways to impress my interviewer and demonstrate that I'm on their wavelength and ready to help make the SL interface even more SLish.

In which case, I wholeheartedly agree.

I saw we drop text chat altogether and make SL pure semaphore.

If it goes totally semaphore, it must be a SLishy style semaphore - undulating, pulsating orange neon outlined semaphor flags with writhing plasma auras that move your camera iup and down and in and out, changing the zoom level from fisheye to microscope, maybe rotating the entire screen while also making the entire display plane appear to spin around continuously. For starters.

Well, there could be a few places where you'd use a dark gray flag that barely moves at all with the background color differing from the flag color by only one intensity value and the whole thing only 3 or 4 pixels high. For variety.

I wouldn't mind attention focusing effects if they were fairly subtle and OPTIONAL. If it gets forced on me then I'm going to have to make a custom client to play.