My heavy files do feel heavy because it takes ages to move them through my painfully slow storage media. Can't say I'm a fan. It's a fun concept though.

Nice experiment!

I agree that providing something more tangible than just a number would be beneficial for some operations. But I think it would get annoying quickly. Having difficulty moving a "heavy" file is the opposite of a good user interface. Every manipulation should require as little mental and physical effort as possible. Apart from that, I can't apply force with my mouse — it just clicks.

I believe a purely visual approach could work well. For example: every file icon has the same front area (basically the rectangles we have now), but visually extends to the back with some sort of stylized 3D effect, according to file size. So a small text file looks like a thin sheet of paper, a 10MB file might look like it's made of thick cardboard, a 2GB video looks like a box with considerable depth. The scaling should probably be logarithmic, not linear, to work well with human perception.

Very interesting, I'm wondering how that would feel in XR!

I already have quite a few demos with manipulating files, e.g. Immersive file browser (via remote WebDAV directories) https://video.benetou.fr/w/rHZTnX5MnHdWvWTPa2Rsw4 so curious how I could try that there.

In WebXR there is no pressure value but maybe more fingers could be needed. Also maybe for heavier files there could be some "lag" where the cube representing the file does follow the pinched fingers but with some delay proportional to the file size. Any suggestion welcomed!

Heavy is relative. If you're working with videos, everything is heavy in terms of file size relative to most files. Yet, a small text file could be just as important as any video.

I think this is a fun thought experiment that is fundamentally a bad product idea.

See "Sonic Finder" for the Macintosh.[1] Heavy folders made bigger thumps when opened, or dragged and dropped. It was not widely used and disappeared. I did try it once. Cool, but not useful.

[1] http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/~ben/references/gaver_the_son...

That was entertaining to try as a demo, but I did not enjoy the UX of it because I don't have a proper sense of how much force I'm using on a touchpad. I have poor dynamic range in the amount of force I exert there.

Awesome. I want to marry this with a concept I had a while ago around a computer keyboard with pressure sensitivity that adjusted the font size in proportion to how hard you struck the keys.

I like the idea of being able to enter into BILLY MAYS MODE just by furiously typing.

Well, they already do in that large files take more time to copy which subconsciously discourages moving them.

If it wasn't for Windows 11's already horrible performance I'd love this idea.

You can emulate pressure sensitivity on Android by tracking the change in the radius of the touch point. With a little effort, it can be made to be nearly identical to the iOS system. I'd go into it or link you to some code, but it was like a decade ago that I last did it. I just remember I got it to work and it was fun.

Interesting concept, but it feels difficult to use. I do think it's a cool demo!

One conceptual issue I noticed with using it is that force touch requires pressure in the opposite direction of how I would understand weight and mass. It feels more like... I'm trying to think of a physical example, trying to force down something with buoyancy. I also expected the weight to affect how fast I needed to drag my finger, but once I exerted enough downward pressure, both heavy and light objects moved the same.

extremely useful in gaming even!

Try it yourself at https://pressureinteraction.netlify.app