Diegetic UI · diegetic-ui

Owner directive (2026-07-10), canonical. "Visual Camera: Always continuous, tracking through the environment (No UI menus breaking immersion; all UI is diegetic, like holograms or physical signposts)." [src: wiki/development/prompts-archive/by-topic/knowledge-management-and-concept-modeling.md:756]

Content

Diegetic UI is the CODELAND interface law: there are no menus. Every interface surface exists inside the world — holograms hovering in a plaza, physical signposts at a node-district gate, glowing work-cells on the terrain — and the camera never cuts away from the environment to show chrome. Two rules fall out of the directive line [src: ...:756]:

1. Continuous camera. The visual camera always tracks through the environment; navigation is movement, not page transitions.
2. In-world surfaces only. Anything an actor reads or operates is an object in the scene: holograms, signposts, radars, equipment.

Mapping to the PAD/POD device layer. The same-day directive grounds diegetic surfaces in the existing scene device vocabulary: "the codeland elements (pad with data) (pod with element of the venture, 3d object, text, image, form, click to zoom in, like in a building and zoom out" [src: ...:663]. Data reads surface as pads; venture elements, 3D objects, and interactions surface as pods. The serving pair follows the owner's same-day answer on membership: "The meembers are DOOITS (Agentic Execution, webservicing, triggers) for the PODS and DITTOS (API Gateway for the PADs)" [src: ...:550] — i.e. ditto → PAD (gateway/fetch feeds the data surfaces) and dooit → POD (agentic execution powers the interactive objects).

Consequences across the world: augmented-intelligence overlays render as holograms, not popups; the work-radar is an in-fiction scanning instrument; sensory-genome narration replaces breadcrumbs and tooltips; zoom-in/zoom-out ("like in a building" [src: ...:663]) replaces drill-down navigation. On the spatial-site, this is why a district is entered, walked, and read — never browsed.

Composition

• uses: pad (data surfaces, served by ditto), pod (interactive objects, served by dooit), scenery + slice (where surfaces are staged)
• used-by: sensory-genome (frame constraint), augmented-intelligence (hologram overlays), work-radar (in-fiction instrument), daily-loop (continuous-camera commute), dynamic-island (its interface law)

See also

• ditto · dooit — the members serving PADs and PODs
• spatial-site — the web surface governed by this law
• holonprint — the render methods diegetic surfaces are expressed through