UXS-014 — /explore v2 · navigating the known universe

Status · Draft v0.1 Visual fidelity · Spec-only at kickoff; signature moments (boundary crossing, warp, lens toggle) get a prototype / visual anchor gating Slice 0 (per the "visual anchor before UX commit" rule) IA anchor · §explore (extends the existing solar-system route outward) Related PRD · PRD-030 · Related RFC · RFC-032

Why this UXS exists

PRD-030 sets the what/why and RFC-032 the how it's built; this UXS owns the part that makes or breaks the epic — how it feels to move through the universe. The navigation is novel (zoom and warp, nested contexts, physics lenses), and without a pinned interaction model it gets designed ad-hoc in scene code — the chaos we're explicitly avoiding. This spec is the contract for movement, orientation, selection, transitions, and discovery, on desktop and mobile.

The one rule: you always know where you are

With teleporting instead of continuous travel, orientation is the scarcest resource. Every screen carries a breadcrumb / "you are here": Solar System › Orion Spur › Milky Way › Local Group. It's always visible, always clickable (each crumb warps back to that context). This is non-negotiable — it's what keeps discovery from becoming disorientation.

Navigation model

• Zoom within a context — the existing /explore camera controls, unchanged. Scroll/pinch out keeps pulling back.
• The boundary crossing (the signature moment) — as you zoom out past the Kuiper/Oort, the solar system smoothly collapses to a single luminous dot and the real nearby-star field fades in around it, re-based into the Neighborhood context. Continuous, legible, cinematic — no hard cut. This is the emotional core of v2; it gets a prototype before code.
• Warp between contexts — beyond the Neighborhood, you don't crawl through empty black. Click a pin (a galaxy, the galactic center) → a 1–2 s cinematic warp with a caption that teaches the distance ("warping 4.24 light-years to Proxima Centauri…", "2.5 million years to Andromeda…"). The warp motivates from a real click and always lands you oriented (breadcrumb updates, target framed).
• Two doors in — (a) wander and stumble on objects in the dark (the discovery joy), and (b) jump straight from a deep-sky gallery photo or an object index via ?goto=<id> (browse-as-collection). Same objects, two ways.

Selecting & understanding an object

Click any star / planet / deep-sky object → the existing Panel opens (bottom-sheet mobile / right drawer desktop), with tactical detail from real data: name, distance ("light left in…"), type/spectral class, and — for exoplanet systems — the full per-planet treatment mirroring our solar-system planets. Selection styling + hover mirror the current /explore conventions. Everything localized (i18n) like /science; every fact carries provenance.

Lenses (physics overlays)

Reuse the Science-Lens control already on /explore. Lenses are toggles on the current scene, not separate screens: curvature (spacetime grid warps around mass — labeled as an analogy), time (dilation readout + light-travel-time), causality (light-cone spheres), property-space (re-projects the same star field onto physical axes — the flyable Hertzsprung-Russell diagram). Only offer lenses meaningful in the active context. A lens never hides the breadcrumb or the exit.

Culture doors

Optional overlay (off by default) that attaches a story card to a real object (Vega → Contact, Gargantua → Interstellar, Kepler-16b → Tatooine). Clearly badged fiction over fact — the real object's science stays primary; the story is a labeled layer. Entry point for later messaging/discussion.

Responsive & performance (desktop + mobile)

• The device budget (RFC-032 C-C) governs dot density: the journey is identical on phone and desktop, the count adapts. Core navigation (zoom, warp, select, breadcrumb) is full parity everywhere.
• Heaviest lenses/shaders (gravitational lensing) may be desktop-first with a graceful mobile tier — never a hard "unsupported," always a legible fallback.
• Touch: pinch-zoom for within-context, tap-a-pin for warp; the breadcrumb is a tappable 44px target row.

Accessibility

Extends the existing /explore a11y (RFC-031): the object index is keyboard-reachable (the DOM "mirror" pattern — every selectable object in a list, ?goto= works without the canvas), breadcrumb is keyboard-navigable, warps announce their destination to screen readers, reduced-motion shortens/skips the warp cinematics and the boundary-collapse animation.

Signature moments that get a visual anchor before build

1. Boundary crossing — Sun → one dot among real stars.
2. A warp — the cinematic hop + distance caption + re-orientation.
3. A lens toggle — the map re-rendered through physics (curvature grid).

These three are prototyped/mocked on real screenshots and gated on Marko's approval before the corresponding slice ships.