Minority Report: How AO Labs Is Designing the Future of Spatial UX

There’s that unforgettable scene in the film Minority Report—Tom Cruise in 2054, gloved hands slicing through layers of glowing data, orchestrating timelines and evidence in midair as if he’s conducting a futuristic symphony. He’s not staring at dashboards or clicking through nested menus—he’s inside the system, manipulating information in space with total clarity and control.

The PreCrime interface is so memorable because it broke free from the constraints of 2D UI. Data wasn’t static—it was spatial, temporal, and relational. It lived all around you. And for the first time, with the Apple Vision Pro and the rise of spatial computing, that level of immersive, intuitive interaction is no longer science fiction—it’s something we can build.

At AO Labs, the R&D group inside About Objects, we’re doing exactly that. We’re working with our clients to design the next generation of user experiences where scene composition replaces dashboards, context is layered in space, and the user’s focus and movement drive the experience. We’re not trying to predict the future—we’re helping experts move through complex data environments with the same clarity and command we’ve only seen in movies.

AI isn’t the Problem—It’s the volume

AI doesn’t just give us smarter answers. It gives us more data. It generates predictions, identifies correlations, maps relationships, flags anomalies, and pulls in external signals like sentiment, news, and risk indicators. It produces insight at a scale we’ve never had access to before.

But insight without structure is noise. And most of today’s tools still assume we’re operating in flat space. Even the best dashboards force users to slice and compress the narrative down into filters and charts. When AI is throwing off multidimensional intelligence, what we really need is a new medium —a way to move through data spatially, intuitively, and contextually.

The Spatial UX We’ve Been Waiting For

Let’s face it: the prompt is a terrible user interface. With Apple Vision Pro, we finally have the canvas, infinite screen real estate, gaze, and gesture control, a spatial memory of where things live and how they connect, and, most importantly, the ability to compose information around the user instead of asking them to dig it out. At AO Labs, we’re using that canvas to build what we call experience intelligence—a dynamic, AI-orchestrated environment that knows who you are and what your role is, understands what you’re focused on, and assembles the relevant information into a spatial scene around you—not just visualized—staged. Not summarized—situated.

Suppose you’re a manager investigating a production delay. In that case, the room around you becomes the context: a real-time timeline floats in front of you as you look out over the production floor, anchored to the production line, with shipment logs and supplier risk overlays arranged spatially to the left and right. A digital expert highlights downstream impact, and related headlines materialize just out of view—until your gaze brings them forward.

This is the Minority Report moment—not as a gimmick, but as a fully integrated part of your thinking environment.

Designed for Experts

Today, a lot of AI tools want to talk to you. They want you to ask a question and hope the model gives a good answer.

We’re designing for a different kind of user: the experienced operator, the person who already knows what questions to ask and who needs the system to keep up. For them, the goal isn’t a conversation. It’s context. It’s having just the right amount of data, structured spatially, so that expertise can do what it does best: spot patterns, draw conclusions, and act.

That’s why our environments are dynamic. They adapt to the data’s shape. They respond to user behavior. They curate rather than clutter. They leave room for exploration because discovery doesn’t happen in a static UI—it occurs in space.

The Role of AI Isn’t to Answer—It’s to Compose

At the heart of this experience is an AI that doesn’t try to take over the decision. Instead, it functions like a world-class assistant director: it sets the stage.

It knows when to bring something closer. When to connect a thread. When to fade irrelevant data to the periphery. It uses identity, behavior, and context to shape the environment so that insight isn’t found—it *emerges*. And when a user shifts focus—from operations to finance, from planning to risk—the entire experience reconfigures in a beat. No menus. No tabs. Just scene changes.

AO Labs and the Next Era of Business Intelligence

The work we’re doing at AO Labs isn’t about porting dashboards into 3D. It’s about redefining interaction when AI is a partner, not a feature.

We’re collaborating with enterprise teams across industries to build spatial UX systems that scale with the complexity of their data and with the sophistication of their people. We’re exploring how digital experts, real-time telemetry, and AI models can come together to generate living environments that guide decision-making without replacing the human at the center of it.

This is what comes next.

Not smarter dashboards.
Not louder alerts.
But fully spatial, situationally aware environments where experts can move through complexity on cruise control.