IISAW | Custom Software Development & Web Design Company UK

How to fly this thing

Every page of IISAW is a standing stone on a ring. Spin the ring, open the stone facing you. Hubs open a new ring; pages open in place. The eye in the centre watches whatever you are looking at.

Touch and pointer

Swipe: Spin the ring. Flick it and it carries, then settles on the nearest stone.
Tap a stone: Brings it to the front. Tap the front one again to open it — a hub opens a new ring, a page opens in place.
Double-tap the eye: Rises to the ring above, landing facing the stone you came out of. The first tap flares the eye, so you can feel the pair land.
Tap outside: Closes an open page.
Drag a page: Scrolls it. An open page owns the whole surface, so the ring stays where you left it.
Wheel: Spins the ring, or scrolls an open page.
Tilt: On a phone, tilt for parallax.

Pinch — three zones

What two fingers do depends on what is under them, decided when the second finger lands and held for the rest of the gesture. Squeezing always means the same thing: let go of whatever you are inside.

On a stone: Dollies the ring you are standing in. The eye behind it does not move.
Squeeze past the stop: Rises a level — the same place the double-tap takes you. The breadcrumb lights up before it fires.
Spread past the stop: Opens the stone at the front.
Anywhere else: Scales the whole view — the eye, the floor, the sky, the gap between two stones — the way pinching a photograph does.
On an open page: Squeezes the page shut, back into the stone it came out of. Close lights up before it fires; let go early and the page springs back.

Keyboard

← →: Step one stone.
↑ / Enter: Open the stone at the front.
↓ / Esc: Go back a level, or close an open page.
Home / End: First or last stone.
+ / −: Dolly in and out.
/: Search everything.
H: Return to the main henge.
M: Sound on or off.
V: Voice on or off.
Tab: Move through the stones. The ring follows focus.

Voice

Press V or hit Voice in the corner and give the browser the microphone. It keeps listening until you switch it off, and prints back what it heard. Nothing is sent anywhere by us — the recognition is the browser's own.

“left” · “right”: Step one stone. Add a number — “right three” — to go further.
“open”: Opens the stone at the front. So does “enter” and “select”.
“back” · “close”: Up a level, or close the page you are reading.
“up” · “down”: Reading a page, they scroll it. Standing in a ring, they rise a level and descend into the front stone.
“top” · “bottom”: Jump to either end of a page.
“zoom in” · “zoom out”: Dolly the ring. “Reset” puts it back.
“home”: Straight back to the main henge.
“go to pricing”: Every page on the site answers to its own name, from anywhere — “show me the work”, “take me to contact”, or just “managed hosting”. Say it as you would to a person: “I want to see”, “could you open”, “please” and the rest are heard and dropped. Near enough counts, so “pricin” and “hosing” land where you meant, and a page added to the site joins the vocabulary the day it is written — there is no list of phrases behind this to fall out of date.
“search for hosting”: Opens the search sheet with the query already in it.
“sound on” · “mute”: The audio, without reaching for it.
“gold” · “make it green”: The base colour, without opening the sheet. Any of the six by name.
“stop listening”: Switches the microphone off. It is the first phrase in the grammar, so it is the one that still works when everything else is being misheard.

With the search sheet open

The microphone stops being a remote control and becomes a keyboard. You are looking at a text field, so everything you say is typed into it and the results follow along as you speak — reading it as a page name would jump the ring behind the sheet you are staring at. Only these stay commands, because none of them can be something you meant to type:

“open” · “take the first one”: Goes to the top result.
“clear” · “start again”: Empties the field so you can say something else.
“close” · “never mind”: Shuts the sheet and leaves you where you were.
“stop listening”: Still first, still the way out.

Needs Chrome, Edge or Safari — the Web Speech API is not in Firefox, and the button says so when it is missing.

“Speech service unreachable”

Not this page, and not your microphone. Chrome and Edge do not transcribe on your machine: they stream the audio to the browser vendor's own speech service and the words come back over the wire. That message means the browser could not reach it. Usually one of four things — no connection at that moment, a VPN or proxy in the way, a school or office network that blocks it, or, on Windows, Speech switched off under Settings → Privacy & security → Speech. The site stands the microphone down after three failed attempts rather than leaving the indicator lit over an engine that is not listening; turn it back on with V once the connection is back.

Gestures

The camera can drive the ring, and it reads the shape of your hand as well as its movement. Wave and the eye follows you, so you can see it has found you before you try anything — and the readout in the corner names what it thinks your hand is.

Fingers left / right: The next stone. On a ring it turns; while you are reading, the next page on that ring comes forward.
Fingers up / down: Read an open page. They do nothing on a ring — same as the arrow keys.
Open palm, held up: Open the stone at the front. It stays open; lower your hand or change it before raising the palm again.
Palm closing into a fist: Close the page, then rise a level. Nothing else closes it.

Use the camera for gestures

Gesture debug — record what the camera sees

The video never leaves this machine. There is no upload and no network request — the frames go straight from the camera into a 64×48 grid in the page, are read for one moving shape, and are thrown away. The site makes no network request of any kind, and this does not change that. A dot prints in the corner whenever the camera is running, on top of the browser's own indicator, and the choice is remembered so it will not open itself on a later visit unless you left it on.

Debug mode is the one exception to “thrown away”, and only while it is ticked. It keeps the last few minutes of frames in the page so they can be looked at beside the numbers the site read off them — which is how a gesture that is not landing gets diagnosed rather than guessed at. They stay in this tab, they are lost when it closes, and they go nowhere at all unless you press save on the panel, which writes one file to your own computer. Still no upload. A panel prints in the corner for as long as it is on, because a mode that records the camera should not be possible to leave running by accident.

“gestures on”: Same as the box above — “watch me” does it too.
“gestures off”: Stops the camera. So does “camera off”.

Colour

The blue is the default and always will be. The other five are the same palette in a different key — every shade keeps its own brightness and its distance from the rest, so the interface does not become a different design, it just stops being blue. All of them on black.

Base colour

Beyond the screen

The whole interface is driveable from code — window.IISAW_HENGE exposes rotateTo, step, open, back, goto, setPointerRay, setZoom and listen, so a gesture rig or a headset can take over without touching the renderer. say('go to pricing') runs a phrase through the voice grammar with no microphone at all — the same door, for anything that can produce words. on(name, fn) answers back: nav when the ring changes level, page when an article opens or closes, front when a different stone comes round. The gesture control above is written against that surface and nothing else, which is why it can be removed from the build without the interface noticing.

The opening

Every arrival gets an introduction: the eye rises out of the surface, speaks, and the ring assembles around it. Any key, click or scroll hurries it along. To stop it happening, tick the box in the bottom-left corner — it is there until you first turn the ring. This button brings the introduction back whether or not you did, and #intro plays it at any time.