olegnassikanov/ouroboros-chat

Ouroboros Chat is a user interface experiment that changes how you navigate through long chat conversations. Instead of only scrolling linearly through messages, it introduces a second navigation mode triggered automatically by how fast you scroll. When you scroll slowly, you get the standard flat chat view, messages stacked in order, most recent at the bottom. But when you scroll quickly (above a certain speed threshold), the interface shifts into a different mode: all your conversation history is rendered as a ring shape viewed from above, like looking down at a circular carousel. Older messages appear smaller and dimmer at the far side of the ring, recent messages are larger and brighter at the near side. You can spin the ring by scrolling while in this mode, and when you stop moving for about a second the camera smoothly transitions back to the flat view, positioned at whichever part of the conversation the ring was pointing to. The reasoning behind this design is that humans tend to have better spatial memory than linear memory, it's easier to remember that something was "in the long middle section" of a conversation than to remember that it was at scroll position 3,000 pixels down the page. The ring view gives the whole conversation a physical shape that maps to that intuition. The project is a single HTML file with no external dependencies and no build step required. It works in any browser and already supports touch and mobile gestures. Planned additions include a package for installation via a package manager and component wrappers for popular interface frameworks.