Welcome back to our ongoing existential crisis about Extended Reality. Last time, we invoked Donald Norman, the UX oracle, to remind ourselves that good design is supposed to be invisible. Now, let’s talk about something that refuses to be invisible: semiotics—the science of signs, symbols, and our collective confusion about what they mean.

Norman taught us that good design should feel intuitive, but semiotics reminds us that “intuition” is really just learned behavior dressed up as common sense. If you think a door should be pushed instead of pulled, it’s not because you were born knowing it—it’s because you’ve seen enough doors to develop an expectation. Now apply that logic to digital interfaces. We’ve spent decades training ourselves to recognize icons and gestures, to trust that a magnifying glass means “search” and that three little lines mean “menu.” But what happens when we shift from 2D screens to 3D environments? Well, things start to get weird.

Take the humble save icon: a floppy disk that a whole generation has never actually used, yet still instinctively clicks on. This is semiotics at work—the signifier (the icon) has completely detached from the signified (the object), but we still understand it because it has survived through sheer digital inertia. Now imagine that same process happening with XR, but with spatial interactions instead of visual metaphors. How do you “click” on something when there’s no screen? How do you “drag and drop” in midair without feeling like a bad mime artist? Welcome to the interface problem of mixed reality.

To understand where we’re headed, let’s take a quick (and wildly oversimplified) detour through the history of human-machine interaction. First, we had command-line interfaces, where you had to type out exact instructions in a digital void and pray you didn’t delete your entire hard drive by accident. Then came graphical user interfaces (GUIs), which introduced buttons, icons, and windows—essentially, training wheels for computers. Touchscreens made everything feel even more natural, because tapping and swiping mimicked real-world gestures. Then came voice assistants, which proved that talking to your devices could be both convenient and infuriating in equal measure. And now? Now we’re trying to figure out how to interact with digital objects floating in 3D space without making fools of ourselves.

Every major shift in interface design has required a cultural adjustment, but XR’s challenge is unique: it demands that we unlearn decades of 2D habits while simultaneously relying on them. Virtual keyboards, for instance, are still modeled after physical ones, even though typing in midair is about as graceful as using a touchscreen with oven mitts. We’re stuck in a strange transitional phase where everything in XR still looks like it belongs in a futuristic theme park ride—hyperrealistic, but not actually functional. It’s the uncanny valley of interaction design.

The real problem, though, isn’t just making XR interfaces work—it’s making them feel natural. In traditional design, skeuomorphism (making digital objects look like their real-world counterparts) helped ease people into new technology. Early iPhone apps had fake leather textures, wooden bookshelves, and glossy buttons because they felt familiar. But over time, we moved toward more abstract, minimalist designs because they were simply more efficient. XR is now facing a similar dilemma: do we keep trying to replicate real-world physics, or do we embrace the weirdness of digital space?

And that’s where things get tricky. The physical world has rules: gravity, friction, the frustrating lack of extra limbs. Digital interfaces don’t have those constraints—but that doesn’t mean we can just throw users into a physics-free chaos and expect them to figure it out. Instead, we need to develop a new culture of interface design, one that acknowledges our dependence on familiar cues while allowing for a gradual evolution toward something more native to mixed reality. Just like how flat design replaced unnecessary skeuomorphic textures in 2D interfaces, XR needs its own shift—one that moves beyond clunky recreations of physical objects and toward something truly intuitive for digital environments.

Every technological leap forces us to rethink how we interact with our tools. The challenge with XR isn’t just about designing better interfaces—it’s about rewiring how we perceive digital space altogether. And that’s no small feat. So as we fumble our way into this new paradigm, let’s take a moment to consider how Norman would approach this. He’d ask, “What makes sense for the user?” And that’s exactly the question we need to keep asking ourselves—before we all end up flailing at invisible buttons like confused air traffic controllers.