Yeah, I started off with looms too, and got frustrated with them.
My current hunch is that it requires a Z axis. Google Earth, for example, manages to convey quite a lot of interesting variables simply (and has maybe been underutilised as a type of UI):
- Longitude
- Latitude
- Granularity / altitude ("the same, but different")
- Paths between destinations
- On Msoft Flight Sim, a slider can amend the time (to change weather, the sun, etc). This gives you another variable to work with.
I haven't tested implementing UIs from this hunch yet, but that's where I'm at currently. It feels like there's a lot of useful parallels.
My current hunch is that it requires a Z axis. Google Earth, for example, manages to convey quite a lot of interesting variables simply (and has maybe been underutilised as a type of UI):
- Longitude
- Latitude
- Granularity / altitude ("the same, but different")
- Paths between destinations
- On Msoft Flight Sim, a slider can amend the time (to change weather, the sun, etc). This gives you another variable to work with.
I haven't tested implementing UIs from this hunch yet, but that's where I'm at currently. It feels like there's a lot of useful parallels.