The Virtual Card Model: cards become objects in space you grab, move and drop into buckets. First shipping use is deliberately narrow — the admin sort room, where you cull and feature the deck by hand in minutes instead of editing the curation overlay item by item. If the physics feel right here, VCM grows into visitor-facing spatial browsing later.
Open hand = dot cursor. Close over a card = grab (card glows, follows the hand). Release over a bucket = sorted, next card floats forward. Two-hand pinch = zoom the whole field. Keyboard/touch fallback: drag with a finger, same buckets.
| Property | Why it de-risks |
|---|---|
| Admin-only | experiments never touch the public brand surface until the physics are proven |
| Real job, real payoff | you actually need to cull 36+ cards; sorting is inherently repetitive — exactly what spatial grabbing is best at |
| Writes to existing plumbing | buckets write the curation overlay (stars/featured/park) that already applies on next deploy — no new backend |
| Same gesture verbs | touch/grab/flick — identical to Grid panning and site scrolling; VCM is the grammar's proving ground |