Predictive Interaction 1: Proximity

I have a current fascination with predictive types of interaction. The goal is to increase efficiency of a website or application by second-guessing what the user wants to do as well as decreasing the amount of accuracy required on a user (might help people with disabilities even).

One of my ideas is to create a list of all interactive elements and figure out which ones of these elements is closest to the mouse pointer. Once an element is found, it will automatically switch to it’s hover state and any mouse clicks at this point will be considered as a click on that element. I think this would be useful for interfaces where there are a large amount of interactive objects ( i.e. buttons )

As a side effect, this seems to be useful for interactive elements that “enlarge” or scale up when they are hovered over and that cover the items behind them. The items behind the said element can still be selected since there is no actual hit area that is blocking the items below (the active element is determined by distance). See the example below for what I mean:

Another example, this one with a more uniform distribution. I thing this can be used for more standard forms of navigation:

I think this method has lots of possible uses, but this does break quite a few conventions. It might also “scare” people the way the interface reacts to the slightest of mouse movements. Have some more ideas to post in the coming days.