13 ms·

Dynamicland

446 points by Pulcinella 9y ago

jf 9y ago
Realtalk is the most exciting computer system that I've used in a long time. The wonder and joy of using Realtalk is very much like the wonder and joy I had at using Linux and Genera for the first time. If you ever get a chance to visit Dynamicland, do not pass it up.
- _mhr_ 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on how Realtalk works? There's a lot of information on Dynamicland, but not much on Realtalk. The gist is that it's like OOP, but physical. But I'm curious as to the exact details of how the printer example (https://dynamicland.org/faq/ https://dynamicland.org/faq/) might work.
mej10 9y ago
Very inspiring work! Would love to try it out.
- jf 9y ago
  > We will be hosting open house events, classes, and studio hours at Dynamicland Oakland in 2018. Please join our mailing list [1] for announcements. 1: https://tinyletter.com/Dynamicland https://tinyletter.com/Dynamicland
JKCalhoun 9y ago
Cool, but I still prefer "Books Not Apps" for our children.
- jf 9y ago
  What do you mean?
  - JKCalhoun 9y ago
    Books can be take home, can be studied by the individual at their own pace. A student can create their own book because it is "real", "physical" and low tech. Also, regarding books, there is, historically, a lot of content.
    - jf 9y ago
      The same applies for Dynamicland. For example: I learned how to use the graphics system in Realtalk with a physical booklet that I could have taken home and studied. The booklet had the code printed out on it, as well as hand written annotations from previous readers. The "magical" part was putting the booklet in a space running Realtalk and seeing live examples of the code projected onto each page as I flipped through the book.
- ivanche 9y ago
  If anything, I believe that Dynamicland and "books not apps" attitude can only complement each other.
- 659087 9y ago
  So do many of the Silicon Valley executives who are pushing their privacy invading products on schools. That's why they send their own children to private "tech-free" schools to prevent them from being exposed to the same products that pay their parents' bills.
  - bvfanboy3 9y ago
    It's reminiscent of how the daughter of one of the Lunchable inventors has never eaten a single Lunchable.
pavlov 9y ago
Awesome, genuinely novel -- really interested to see where this goes: A primary design principle at Dynamicland is that all running code must be visible, physically printed on paper. Thus whenever a program is running, its source code is right there for anybody to see and modify. Likewise the operating system itself is implemented as pages of code, and members of the community constantly modify and improve it. That said, the pages of code physically in Dynamicland are not in a git repository. The community organizes code spatially — laying it out on tables and walls, storing it in folders, binders, and bookshelves. https://dynamicland.org/faq/ https://dynamicland.org/faq/
- RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
  I'm reminded of an old bash.org quote: <erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.
- sterlind 9y ago
  perhaps I'm missing something, but wouldn't large-scale adoption like they're projecting be really hard on the environment? Dynamicland introduces a 1:1, persistent mapping between virtual and tangible. won't this kill a lot of trees?
  - michaelscott 9y ago
    Yeah I noticed this as well. It will work well as an integration into existing spaces, or some built specifically for this reason (as mentioned on the website). The space and resource requirements definitely stifle it for ubiquitous application but hey, it's an early tech and it'll certainly improve in time.
modernerd 9y ago
I love the description of Dynamicland as “Hypercard in the World”[1]. [1] From the Laser Socks write-up — a great example of a game that came out of Dynamicland: http://glench.com/LaserSocks/ http://glench.com/LaserSocks/
- Glench 9y ago
  A small technical point: "Hypercard in the World" was one of the prototype systems that came before Realtalk, which is the operating system and protocol that runs Dynamicland.
kindfellow92 9y ago
Inspiring to see successful startup founders re-investing in the community: Andy Hertzfeld Mitch Kapor Patrick Collison Drew Houston Alex Payne Josh Elkes Carlin Wiegner Notion UCSF
canadian_voter 9y ago
One guest, after spending time at Dynamicland, held up his smartphone and shouted, “This thing is a prison!” Holy crap. This is really, really cool. Actual magic. But most importantly — programs are real. You touch them. You see them everywhere — they can only run when visible. You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes. I think I'm in love. The computer of the future is not a product, but a place.
- canadianwriter 9y ago
  Things like the Google home and Amazon echo are a step in that direction. Using the internet just by asking questions out loud are a novel way to interact with a computer. Can't wait to see where this goes.
  - azeirah 9y ago
    "Canadianwriter" responds to "canadian_voter", can't help but notice it :p
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    Voice control is in the right direction but Home and Echo are in the wrong direction: "You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes."
- mcphage 9y ago
  > You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes. From the reverse: if something happens, how can I tell which piece of paper somewhere in the room made that happen?
  - jf 9y ago
    One of the ideas I heard people at Dynamicland mention is to have Realtalk project highlights over the dependencies (this would be possible because Realktalk is self hosting, all the code that runs Realtalk is printed on paper) In practice, when I wanted to see how something worked, I would just ask somebody in the room and get pointed to where the dependency was.
nickbauman 9y ago
Reminds me of Bret Victor's (ostensible maker of the iPad) post on interaction design: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
- nchuhoai 9y ago
  You should be happy to hear that Bret Victor is behind Dynamicland https://dynamicland.org/about-us/ https://dynamicland.org/about-us/
- azeirah 9y ago
  Something I really dislike about the way he presents his work is that he is intentionally really really vague about what his contribution was to those various products, in his presentations he often shows a few slides "I worked on this, this and this", where the iPad and watch get shown.. Like, what did you do? Design the home screen? Design the vision of the machine itself? It's ambiguity taken to its highest extreme. I really respect his work and publications though, no doubt that he made important contributions to the products he shows on his slides.
  - bvfanboy3 9y ago
    See his details on his work at Apple here: http://worrydream.com/#!/Apple http://worrydream.com/#!/Apple Spoiler: he can't talk about or show any details for some number of years. From his notes there and his other research, it seems would have been a proponent for skeuomorphic design at Apple, which lost out after 2011 in favor of flat buttons and icons.
    - nickbauman 9y ago
      The skeuomorphic design "battle" is a myth. Look at the iphone settings icon today: there are no gears in your phone. Skeuomorphism lives on, we just believe what The Submarine tells us.
arghbleargh 9y ago
Sounds intriguing, but after reading through the website for 5 minutes, I still have no idea how this is supposed to work. From the pictures, it looks like they've set up some kind of system to translate certain physical movements into changes in the projected images. It seems like a non-technical user can only make superficial changes within a limited set of pre-defined behaviors. But from the description it sounds like there's a lot more to it than that...
- jf 9y ago
  Right now, each piece of paper in Dymanicland is a program. You put a piece of paper down and it "runs" - the metaphor breaks down at this point though. With a little bit of code, anything in Dynamicland can become "alive" and interactive. For me, the impressive part of Dymanicland is how physical everything is. Want to see how something works? Find the paper that the code is printed on. Need help understanding some code? Bring somebody over to the wall, table, or couch where the code is. You can annotate the paper, draw diagrams on it, cut it, fold it, tear it, put it in a book to help others learn how it works. Want to edit some code? Point an "editor" token at the paper program you want to modify, then start changing the code. Dynamicland isn't a room with a computer, it's a room that is a computer.
  - lfowles 9y ago
    I'm looking for more details as well, the idea fascinates me. Each program looks to be a code printout, so I'm not quite grasping how changing code works with just an "editor token".
    - mquander 9y ago
      The printed code is sort of just a documentation -- the system isn't, for example, scanning it visually to decide what to execute. Rather, each card encodes a unique ID, and the running code lives on the network at that ID, so you can point your editor at the card, read the ID, and see and edit the code at that ID. The printout is just the code that was at the ID at the time of printing.
lawry 9y ago
I'm instantly reminded of "The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  Then you’ll like: https://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/1968-demo-interactive.html https://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/1968-demo-interactive.h...
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Is this going to eventually be a product ? Or will there be a open source solution created ? I really like the idea it is making things be on the network. I bet you have really tight feedback loops reading on the design . Does cut and paste work and also photocopying the code ?
- jf 9y ago
  See the FAQ [1] which answers some, but not all, of your questions. 1: https://dynamicland.org/faq/ https://dynamicland.org/faq/
jancsika 9y ago
There seems to be this difficulty in visual-based programming: 1. If you want to maximize composibility, then you want the "units" (here, the units would be the sheets of paper they're using) as general and uniform as possible. Think lego blocks. 2. If you want to maximize expressivity, then you want the "units" that encapsulate (probably turing complete) code. Think flowcharts or diagrams where each descriptor references a method, or a library, or eve an entire subsystem. The problem with #1 is that it's extremely difficult to build large, complex projects that way. A problem with #2 is that the "visual programming" aspect eventually gets revealed to be merely a stepping stone to "real programming" of writing in code. This project looks to be an example of #2. Am I right? If that is so, does that mean that creating complex projects would naturally lead to larger and larger amounts of code on a single sheet?
- skadamat 9y ago
  I'd personally really like for code to go away / not need to use it. It's an important bootstrapping step, but really only the hardware of the 60s and 70s more / less needed text, files, and source code. With the physical environment of Dynamicland, "code" can be re-represented using physical objects, and we may not even need it. That's a really exciting idea!
  - Pulcinella 9y ago
    Yes! Coding != Programming You can still have programming without text-based coding.
- Sophistifunk 9y ago
  A good stepping stone to exploring this space would be a useable complete system in which you layout high level concerns such as architecture, use-cases, and user-interface behaviour using a "system 2" style, and can dive into code just for the details. A separation of which concerns are built using declarative modelling (the "system 2" stuff), infrastructure built using a normal imperative programming language, and the actual business logic when it can't be generated entirely from models being implemented in a functional programming language with a strict subset of the procedural code. And most importantly (and probably the most work) the user interface for this would have to be extremely polished and well-thought-out.
mendeza 9y ago
Super exciting Bret Victor publicly launched this project! On a related note, A professor at MIT, Hiroshi Ishii, has done a lot of work in tangible user interfaces around 2003-2005, you can see more work here: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/ http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/ Definately the visions/goals are differently motivated, but interesting to see more examples of adding tangible control to computing.
- skadamat 9y ago
  More overlap than you think! In his talk - https://vimeo.com/115154289 https://vimeo.com/115154289 - Bret has a footnote reference to Radical Atoms group (Hiroshi's group)
  - mendeza 9y ago
    Awesome! I forgot about that mention. You should see what that research group is doing now. "Radical Atoms" where the material is dynamic and embodies computation. Now they are applying it to food... super fascinating!
wwarner 9y ago
I have nothing constructive to say except that i love it.
ivanche 9y ago
I just love the word play of Smalltalk and Realtalk!
Sophistifunk 9y ago
This seems like an excellent toy, a great tool for education, and possibly a good UI for future end-user systems that mostly live in the cloud. But in no way something that could be used to build those systems. Almost everything that's good and powerful about software comes precisely because it's non-physical. It's probably just a failure of imagination on my part, but I can't see a path where re-introducing a bunch of physical representations of virtual things makes things better for those trying to create, maintain, or understand complex systems.
- gasbag 9y ago
  Their FAQ seems to disagree with you: Is Dynamicland open source? Dynamicland shares many core values with the open source movement and in some ways goes beyond them. A primary design principle at Dynamicland is that all running code must be visible, physically printed on paper. Thus whenever a program is running, its source code is right there for anybody to see and modify. Likewise the operating system itself is implemented as pages of code, and members of the community constantly modify and improve it. That said, the pages of code physically in Dynamicland are not in a git repository. The community organizes code spatially — laying it out on tables and walls, storing it in folders, binders, and bookshelves. https://dynamicland.org/faq/ https://dynamicland.org/faq/
  - westoncb 9y ago
    The parent made a good point, and your comment is completely unrelated although it purports to be an argument against it.
- azeirah 9y ago
  I can see this being very useful for Software Engineers, although I agree with you not directly for building systems. Scrum boards, build statuses and project statistics are good candidates for this system. I can also see it being useful as a very general _and_ powerful prototyping tool, one of the demos shows someone making an input controller from a physical spring and a colored piece of clay. When it becomes so easy to integrate your environment with the computer, I can only begin to imagine what's possible.
jongold 9y ago
One of the coolest things I've ever played with. It's hard to describe how antiquated engaging with computation through 5.5" or 15" rectangles is when you've seen a whole building that is a computer
mapster 9y ago
I've failed to grasp it enough to explain it to a 5 yr old, but I think i love the idea. I've always cringed at giving a 10 yr old a laptop which simply becomes a conduit to a flash-based gaming in the browser. Activity based programming should be the foundation for years before they touch a PC imho. Its collaborative and fun - so it seems.
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
  At least a laptop can become more, the opportunity to delve deeper in the system or learn how to code your own applications is always there if the curiosity should ever arise. Tablets on the other hand... literally just consumption devices, even creative applications in them are locked up and siloed unable to inter-operate.
Waterluvian 9y ago
Are all those large dots necessary for localization? They're really distracting me.
- jf 9y ago
  As I understand it, the dots are just a temporary measure while the team works on implementing better methods of detecting objects.
GuiA 9y ago
There are a lot of comments here about how Dynamicland is a bit confusing to understand, and the website is light on details. The latter is true - it would be nice if there were academic style papers describing the system, or reference source code, etc. - but I understand that right now, their time is mostly dedicated to building+fundraising, and the goal of this website is to have something rather than nothing online. That being said, Dynamicland inherits a lot from many previous subfields in computing. If anyone wants to get deeper, and try to wrap their head around what Dynamicland aims to be, here are what I think a few starting points: - Alan Kay's STEPS paper, the goal of which is to have a fully implemented OS + base libraries etc in a few thousands of lines of codes at most, by using modern patterns and abstractions. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf - Bret Victor's "Seeing Spaces" is pretty much the precursor to Dynamic Land http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/ http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/ - Ishii & Ullmer's seminal paper "Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms" (which precedes Dynamicland by 20 years, but I think many core goals are shared) https://trackr-media.tangiblemedia.org/publishedmedia/Papers/331-Tangible%20Bits%20Towards%20Seamless/Published/PDF https://trackr-media.tangiblemedia.org/publishedmedia/Papers... This paper kickstarted the whole "tangible interaction" subfield of Human Computer Interaction. If you wish to dive even deeper, I recommend: - reading Ullmer's PhD thesis, of which the previous paper is essentially a TL;DR http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~ullmer/thesis/full-noblanks.pdf http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~ullmer/thesis/full-noblanks.pdf - checking out the proceedings of TEI, the ACM conference for Tangible & Embodied Interaction (sadly you'll need an ACM digital library membership, but if you are a computer scientist it is very much worth it and you should get your job/school to pay for it if you can). https://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE271 https://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE271 I have no ties to Dynamicland besides having visited it, but I have done my graduate studies under one of the aforementioned authors and shared workplaces with people from Bret's group, so I'm happy to talk more about the whole "tangible interaction" aspect of it all.
- vbuwivbiu 9y ago
  Also, I saw a demo of a similar technology in the 1990s at Sussex University, in which a projector was used to create an interactive table where one could write calculations with a pen and the results would appear projected (the numbers having been recognized) and sketches could be augmented with shape-recognition
morsch 9y ago
This seems like an interesting experience. But the wording on that page is as much of a turn-off to me as the most the most cliche PR lorem ipsum. I feel dumber having read it.
- westoncb 9y ago
  Yep. And when you think that's bad, then you see some of the comments here which appear to be aping it for free...
misterHN 9y ago
> The entire building is the computer This is precisely the principle on which a lottery is based, in the style of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The lottery knows that humans have a hunger, a thirst for transitioning into monsters, then returning to their normal form. This maintains balance with nature while giving the community a sense of control over the forces of anger. The society is a computer, and if the society is based on a lottery, then the lottery is a computer. The lottery is a computer, and anyone can shut it off---just convince enough people to abandon tradition. Nobody shuts it off because they have become accustomed to the way the lottery manages the population. It brings stability to the community, and freedom. It is something to live in fear of.
archagon 9y ago
I love the passion behind this project, but as with most physical or high-level UIs, the idea strikes me as overly hubristic. In my experience, truly marvelous works of interaction which expand the range of human thinking require thousands (upon thousands) of lines of code. Clearly, that kind of logic can't fit on scattered, small bits of paper. So is most of that complexity defined by whatever code keeps this thing running? (Realtalk?) Does this mean that the limits of your thinking in this environment are constrained by the skill and intent of the coders developing the system libraries? I feel this will end up becoming little more than a (really cool) room-sized toy, not something that will change the way we think and interact. Maybe boring ASCII code is simply the correct, inescapable tool for the job. Maybe expanding the range of human thinking is impossible inside a system that can't modify itself. (But maybe I'm completely wrong!) EDIT: One of the other comments mentioned that Realtalk is self-hosted on pieces of paper. Hmm, that makes this a whole lot more interesting!
- benfle 9y ago
  Aren't we lucky to have stumbled upon the "correct tool for the job" at our first attempt.
  - archagon 9y ago
    I mean, you could argue that just as with writing, code is emergent from our biology. Brains are naturally wired for language and symbolic thought. Once computation was defined and made technically possible, perhaps the current form of programming was simply inevitable. Not that other things aren't worth trying, of course.
- andars 9y ago
  Here is the code for Realtalk: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg Source: https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/907253802931126272 https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/907253802931126272
- enjalot 9y ago
  Don't forget that programming languages get more abstract and hence more powerful with fewer lines of code. RealTalk has functions you can call to get the physical location of a piece of paper and being based on Lua makes it much more expressive than C++. You can keep digging down levels of abstraction but the interesting parts of this system are extremely accessible.
foota 9y ago
At first I thought this was a room sized vr code organization library thing? Like you could have a house with different rooms corresponding to different packages
wyck 9y ago
> And everyone gets their hands on everything! You walk by, you see what someone is making, you play with it and trade ideas, you sit down and work on it together. This happens constantly. Abandon your virtaul dreams hackers.. start to socalize and group think. And use paper.
- llamataboot 9y ago
  I'm not sure what kind of software you write, but every large piece of software I've ever worked on has required collaboration, and collaboration done well builds better software than any one coder could write by themselves.
  - comex 9y ago
    Not the OP, but I suffer from social anxiety, and the ability to socialize outside of "real life" is a huge part of what attracted me to tech as a kid. So to me, the idea of replacing data and virtual collaboration with a big noisy room sounds… well, it sounds like a nightmare, a dystopia. It actually makes my heart race a bit just thinking about it. Of course, that doesn't mean the project is bad, just that it's profoundly unsuited to me personally. But I'm probably not the only person like that on this forum...
  - programmarchy 9y ago
    In contrast, often times a core design is created by one particularly brilliant individual, which is stable enough for others to build upon. For example, Linux (Torvald), Minecraft (notch), Redis (antirez), C++ (Stroustrup), Ruby (Matz), NodeJS (Dahl), Bitcoin (Satoshi), etc... I'd be interested to hear of examples of "great" software that started off in a collaborative fashion.
apatters 9y ago
Are there some example applications created at Dynamicland that we can look at? i.e. what has actually been done with this platform to date? (Not sure applications and platform are the correct terms to use, but this concept is totally new to me)
- ngokevin 9y ago
  Check their Twitter https://twitter.com/Dynamicland1 https://twitter.com/Dynamicland1
  - apatters 9y ago
    Fascinating stuff there!!
SolarNet 9y ago
This is a cool project. But their opinion on the open source status of their systems seems pretty entitled, arrogant even. There are a lot of questions left unanswered, and the implications of their text is disingenuous at best. Claiming their system is "beyond" open source. Yet I can't find any way of experimenting with this system myself. They fail all the tests of truly free open source software [0], let alone even the sniff test of being merely open source (can I read it?). This software is no more liberating than a "free" windows product given and taught to kids in a hope to encourage vendor lockin. They use words like "lift all people" or "agency not apps": nah, only those people who live nearby in one of the most expensive places in the world. The system is confined to their magic building, will they charge fees? are only those wealthy enough to travel and live near one be able to experience it? can anyone set up these buildings (around 2040 no less), or is there a franchise fee or agreement that is required? where is the code (scanners are a thing; what about the bootstrap code running on the servers)? They claim to be basing the model off of the internet. Decentralized agreed upon protocols. How can I talk to their system if nothing is published? If there is no code to read? How in the world is that an open decentralized protocol? How can people iterate - provide feed back - when they don't even have RFCs or any published material at all. They are promoting exactly the walled garden behavior that is the antithesis of the open model of the internet. The whole thing is suspect. I realize they are a non-profit, great. But that doesn't mean they support the ideals of a public commons like a free and open source project. It doesn't mean donations to this project will truly be helpful to everyone. Yet they are "beyond" open source. It reeks of arrogance and entitlement to claim such things. It rubs me the wrong way. Especially because it seems so cool. [0] For those who forget: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  > Yet I can't find any way of experimenting with this system myself. Given that it's a physical space... you go to the physical space. You can pick up the source code for the entire thing there - it's self-hosting, so you can read it like any other object in Dynamicland. You can also copy it physically, using a scanner.[0] Actually finding a suitable physical space and building a community might be the the hardest part of replicating it. It's also a very early project - the first Dynamicland space opens next year. I'm sure we'll learn more about it, but the entire point of it is that it's not online - it's a physical space and a community meeting in real life, and if you want to learn about it and maybe try to replicate it, you'll have to go there. [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg
flixic 9y ago
This looks very interesting, but the most confusing part for me is how code appears on these printed pages. Do you have to type it in computer and print to run, using physical space just to organise, not actually develop? All the examples show these pieces of paper already being there, just moved and interacted with. I'm very curious if DynamicLand code can be created without touching keyboard, and actually printing new sheets by just moving and interacting with other sheets, making it actually self-hosting. Also, their examples are very visual and quite complicated (car aerodynamics flow). Doing this from scratch might be quite challenging, unless building blocks are very smart. --- Sidenote: I'm surprised to learn that code printed on these sheets is Lua-based. Lua does not have a lot of syntax, but does have some, and I would think that any language that is meant to be created in physical space should aim for the most minimal syntax, almost none if possible. Lisp comes to mind, as I can image a physical representation of S-expressions much better than Lua code.
- TheRealPomax 9y ago
  I'm not sure I understand why one would expect that any language that is meant to be created in physical space should aim for the most minimal syntax. Regular folks who don't program in their daily life connect best with things they can read: presenting them with lisp is a bit like presenting them with mathmatical notation: even if those that are marginally familiar with them will say it's simple, it's exactly too difficult to be accessible for people who have _no_ familiarity with them at all. You actually want that verbosity of added syntax, because it lets people recognize something in what is inherently alien to them.
  - flixic 9y ago
    You don't want syntax because you don't want Magnetic Poetry kits, having to arrange very special "structure words" in very special places, and hope that "lines" make sense. Don't think about (Lisp (notation)) -- think about the fact that the entire syntax is "this is enclosing box" (can easily be done with paper by putting smaller sheets on larger ones) and "this is the order of items within the box" (very natural to re-arrange these blocks). Lisp doesn't have lines, in that sense, and lines don't make a lot of sense in physical world. Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing about the fact that Lisp is a bit complicated to be first programming language _when writing text_. But its design is great for physical manipulation.
onikolas 9y ago
Exciting project! Looks like it could lead to some real advances in human-computer interaction. Large working area(desk, walls or the whole floor) and automatically tracking and digitizing written notes and diagrams sounds very cool. Maybe this and voice recognition will be the future of HCI if someone manages to iron out the kinks and make it seamless. But programming by putting A4 sheets side by side? I only see that being useful as an education tool.
MichaelMoser123 9y ago
is there a video/life demonstration that shows off the basic interactions of the system? So far I have not been able to understand what the system is actually doing and how to use it (searched but did not find any demos on youtube)
- zeep 9y ago
  They probably have a camera and a projector on the ceiling. The camera detects the dots on sheets of paper to be able to differentiate them. You will probably need a computer to code what each sheet is going to do. > Every scrap of paper has the capabilities of a full computer, while remaining a fully-functional scrap of paper. this is probably a false statement...
millettjon 9y ago
I would be happy to donate if that would support open sourcing enough to bootstrap this in other locations.
pazimzadeh 9y ago
Can we get a picture of the ceiling?

446 points by Pulcinella 9y ago

jf 9y ago

Realtalk is the most exciting computer system that I've used in a long time. The wonder and joy of using Realtalk is very much like the wonder and joy I had at using Linux and Genera for the first time. If you ever get a chance to visit Dynamicland, do not pass it up.

_mhr_ 9y ago
Could you elaborate on how Realtalk works? There's a lot of information on Dynamicland, but not much on Realtalk. The gist is that it's like OOP, but physical. But I'm curious as to the exact details of how the printer example (https://dynamicland.org/faq/ https://dynamicland.org/faq/) might work.

mej10 9y ago

Very inspiring work! Would love to try it out.

jf 9y ago
> We will be hosting open house events, classes, and studio hours at Dynamicland Oakland in 2018. Please join our mailing list [1] for announcements. 1: https://tinyletter.com/Dynamicland https://tinyletter.com/Dynamicland

JKCalhoun 9y ago

Cool, but I still prefer "Books Not Apps" for our children.

jf 9y ago
What do you mean?
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  Books can be take home, can be studied by the individual at their own pace. A student can create their own book because it is "real", "physical" and low tech. Also, regarding books, there is, historically, a lot of content.
  - jf 9y ago
    The same applies for Dynamicland. For example: I learned how to use the graphics system in Realtalk with a physical booklet that I could have taken home and studied. The booklet had the code printed out on it, as well as hand written annotations from previous readers. The "magical" part was putting the booklet in a space running Realtalk and seeing live examples of the code projected onto each page as I flipped through the book.
ivanche 9y ago
If anything, I believe that Dynamicland and "books not apps" attitude can only complement each other.
659087 9y ago
So do many of the Silicon Valley executives who are pushing their privacy invading products on schools. That's why they send their own children to private "tech-free" schools to prevent them from being exposed to the same products that pay their parents' bills.
- bvfanboy3 9y ago
  It's reminiscent of how the daughter of one of the Lunchable inventors has never eaten a single Lunchable.

pavlov 9y ago

Awesome, genuinely novel -- really interested to see where this goes: A primary design principle at Dynamicland is that all running code must be visible, physically printed on paper. Thus whenever a program is running, its source code is right there for anybody to see and modify. Likewise the operating system itself is implemented as pages of code, and members of the community constantly modify and improve it. That said, the pages of code physically in Dynamicland are not in a git repository. The community organizes code spatially — laying it out on tables and walls, storing it in folders, binders, and bookshelves. https://dynamicland.org/faq/ https://dynamicland.org/faq/

RodgerTheGreat 9y ago
I'm reminded of an old bash.org quote: <erno> hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is.
sterlind 9y ago
perhaps I'm missing something, but wouldn't large-scale adoption like they're projecting be really hard on the environment? Dynamicland introduces a 1:1, persistent mapping between virtual and tangible. won't this kill a lot of trees?
- michaelscott 9y ago
  Yeah I noticed this as well. It will work well as an integration into existing spaces, or some built specifically for this reason (as mentioned on the website). The space and resource requirements definitely stifle it for ubiquitous application but hey, it's an early tech and it'll certainly improve in time.

modernerd 9y ago

I love the description of Dynamicland as “Hypercard in the World”[1]. [1] From the Laser Socks write-up — a great example of a game that came out of Dynamicland: http://glench.com/LaserSocks/ http://glench.com/LaserSocks/

Glench 9y ago
A small technical point: "Hypercard in the World" was one of the prototype systems that came before Realtalk, which is the operating system and protocol that runs Dynamicland.

kindfellow92 9y ago

Inspiring to see successful startup founders re-investing in the community: Andy Hertzfeld Mitch Kapor Patrick Collison Drew Houston Alex Payne Josh Elkes Carlin Wiegner Notion UCSF

canadian_voter 9y ago

One guest, after spending time at Dynamicland, held up his smartphone and shouted, “This thing is a prison!” Holy crap. This is really, really cool. Actual magic. But most importantly — programs are real. You touch them. You see them everywhere — they can only run when visible. You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes. I think I'm in love. The computer of the future is not a product, but a place.

canadianwriter 9y ago
Things like the Google home and Amazon echo are a step in that direction. Using the internet just by asking questions out loud are a novel way to interact with a computer. Can't wait to see where this goes.
- azeirah 9y ago
  "Canadianwriter" responds to "canadian_voter", can't help but notice it :p
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  Voice control is in the right direction but Home and Echo are in the wrong direction: "You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes."
mcphage 9y ago
> You can change anything and see what happens. No black boxes. From the reverse: if something happens, how can I tell which piece of paper somewhere in the room made that happen?
- jf 9y ago
  One of the ideas I heard people at Dynamicland mention is to have Realtalk project highlights over the dependencies (this would be possible because Realktalk is self hosting, all the code that runs Realtalk is printed on paper) In practice, when I wanted to see how something worked, I would just ask somebody in the room and get pointed to where the dependency was.

nickbauman 9y ago

Reminds me of Bret Victor's (ostensible maker of the iPad) post on interaction design: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

nchuhoai 9y ago
You should be happy to hear that Bret Victor is behind Dynamicland https://dynamicland.org/about-us/ https://dynamicland.org/about-us/
azeirah 9y ago
Something I really dislike about the way he presents his work is that he is intentionally really really vague about what his contribution was to those various products, in his presentations he often shows a few slides "I worked on this, this and this", where the iPad and watch get shown.. Like, what did you do? Design the home screen? Design the vision of the machine itself? It's ambiguity taken to its highest extreme. I really respect his work and publications though, no doubt that he made important contributions to the products he shows on his slides.
- bvfanboy3 9y ago
  See his details on his work at Apple here: http://worrydream.com/#!/Apple http://worrydream.com/#!/Apple Spoiler: he can't talk about or show any details for some number of years. From his notes there and his other research, it seems would have been a proponent for skeuomorphic design at Apple, which lost out after 2011 in favor of flat buttons and icons.
  - nickbauman 9y ago
    The skeuomorphic design "battle" is a myth. Look at the iphone settings icon today: there are no gears in your phone. Skeuomorphism lives on, we just believe what The Submarine tells us.

arghbleargh 9y ago

Sounds intriguing, but after reading through the website for 5 minutes, I still have no idea how this is supposed to work. From the pictures, it looks like they've set up some kind of system to translate certain physical movements into changes in the projected images. It seems like a non-technical user can only make superficial changes within a limited set of pre-defined behaviors. But from the description it sounds like there's a lot more to it than that...

jf 9y ago
Right now, each piece of paper in Dymanicland is a program. You put a piece of paper down and it "runs" - the metaphor breaks down at this point though. With a little bit of code, anything in Dynamicland can become "alive" and interactive. For me, the impressive part of Dymanicland is how physical everything is. Want to see how something works? Find the paper that the code is printed on. Need help understanding some code? Bring somebody over to the wall, table, or couch where the code is. You can annotate the paper, draw diagrams on it, cut it, fold it, tear it, put it in a book to help others learn how it works. Want to edit some code? Point an "editor" token at the paper program you want to modify, then start changing the code. Dynamicland isn't a room with a computer, it's a room that is a computer.
- lfowles 9y ago
  I'm looking for more details as well, the idea fascinates me. Each program looks to be a code printout, so I'm not quite grasping how changing code works with just an "editor token".
  - mquander 9y ago
    The printed code is sort of just a documentation -- the system isn't, for example, scanning it visually to decide what to execute. Rather, each card encodes a unique ID, and the running code lives on the network at that ID, so you can point your editor at the card, read the ID, and see and edit the code at that ID. The printout is just the code that was at the ID at the time of printing.

lawry 9y ago

I'm instantly reminded of "The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Pulcinella 9y ago
Then you’ll like: https://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/1968-demo-interactive.html https://www.dougengelbart.org/firsts/1968-demo-interactive.h...

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Is this going to eventually be a product ? Or will there be a open source solution created ? I really like the idea it is making things be on the network. I bet you have really tight feedback loops reading on the design . Does cut and paste work and also photocopying the code ?

jf 9y ago
See the FAQ [1] which answers some, but not all, of your questions. 1: https://dynamicland.org/faq/ https://dynamicland.org/faq/

jancsika 9y ago

There seems to be this difficulty in visual-based programming: 1. If you want to maximize composibility, then you want the "units" (here, the units would be the sheets of paper they're using) as general and uniform as possible. Think lego blocks. 2. If you want to maximize expressivity, then you want the "units" that encapsulate (probably turing complete) code. Think flowcharts or diagrams where each descriptor references a method, or a library, or eve an entire subsystem. The problem with #1 is that it's extremely difficult to build large, complex projects that way. A problem with #2 is that the "visual programming" aspect eventually gets revealed to be merely a stepping stone to "real programming" of writing in code. This project looks to be an example of #2. Am I right? If that is so, does that mean that creating complex projects would naturally lead to larger and larger amounts of code on a single sheet?

skadamat 9y ago
I'd personally really like for code to go away / not need to use it. It's an important bootstrapping step, but really only the hardware of the 60s and 70s more / less needed text, files, and source code. With the physical environment of Dynamicland, "code" can be re-represented using physical objects, and we may not even need it. That's a really exciting idea!
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  Yes! Coding != Programming You can still have programming without text-based coding.
Sophistifunk 9y ago
A good stepping stone to exploring this space would be a useable complete system in which you layout high level concerns such as architecture, use-cases, and user-interface behaviour using a "system 2" style, and can dive into code just for the details. A separation of which concerns are built using declarative modelling (the "system 2" stuff), infrastructure built using a normal imperative programming language, and the actual business logic when it can't be generated entirely from models being implemented in a functional programming language with a strict subset of the procedural code. And most importantly (and probably the most work) the user interface for this would have to be extremely polished and well-thought-out.

mendeza 9y ago

Super exciting Bret Victor publicly launched this project! On a related note, A professor at MIT, Hiroshi Ishii, has done a lot of work in tangible user interfaces around 2003-2005, you can see more work here: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/ http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/ Definately the visions/goals are differently motivated, but interesting to see more examples of adding tangible control to computing.

skadamat 9y ago
More overlap than you think! In his talk - https://vimeo.com/115154289 https://vimeo.com/115154289 - Bret has a footnote reference to Radical Atoms group (Hiroshi's group)
- mendeza 9y ago
  Awesome! I forgot about that mention. You should see what that research group is doing now. "Radical Atoms" where the material is dynamic and embodies computation. Now they are applying it to food... super fascinating!

wwarner 9y ago

I have nothing constructive to say except that i love it.

ivanche 9y ago

I just love the word play of Smalltalk and Realtalk!

Sophistifunk 9y ago

This seems like an excellent toy, a great tool for education, and possibly a good UI for future end-user systems that mostly live in the cloud. But in no way something that could be used to build those systems. Almost everything that's good and powerful about software comes precisely because it's non-physical. It's probably just a failure of imagination on my part, but I can't see a path where re-introducing a bunch of physical representations of virtual things makes things better for those trying to create, maintain, or understand complex systems.

gasbag 9y ago
Their FAQ seems to disagree with you: Is Dynamicland open source? Dynamicland shares many core values with the open source movement and in some ways goes beyond them. A primary design principle at Dynamicland is that all running code must be visible, physically printed on paper. Thus whenever a program is running, its source code is right there for anybody to see and modify. Likewise the operating system itself is implemented as pages of code, and members of the community constantly modify and improve it. That said, the pages of code physically in Dynamicland are not in a git repository. The community organizes code spatially — laying it out on tables and walls, storing it in folders, binders, and bookshelves. https://dynamicland.org/faq/ https://dynamicland.org/faq/
- westoncb 9y ago
  The parent made a good point, and your comment is completely unrelated although it purports to be an argument against it.
azeirah 9y ago
I can see this being very useful for Software Engineers, although I agree with you not directly for building systems. Scrum boards, build statuses and project statistics are good candidates for this system. I can also see it being useful as a very general _and_ powerful prototyping tool, one of the demos shows someone making an input controller from a physical spring and a colored piece of clay. When it becomes so easy to integrate your environment with the computer, I can only begin to imagine what's possible.

jongold 9y ago

One of the coolest things I've ever played with. It's hard to describe how antiquated engaging with computation through 5.5" or 15" rectangles is when you've seen a whole building that is a computer

mapster 9y ago

I've failed to grasp it enough to explain it to a 5 yr old, but I think i love the idea. I've always cringed at giving a 10 yr old a laptop which simply becomes a conduit to a flash-based gaming in the browser. Activity based programming should be the foundation for years before they touch a PC imho. Its collaborative and fun - so it seems.

whywhywhywhy 9y ago
At least a laptop can become more, the opportunity to delve deeper in the system or learn how to code your own applications is always there if the curiosity should ever arise. Tablets on the other hand... literally just consumption devices, even creative applications in them are locked up and siloed unable to inter-operate.

Waterluvian 9y ago

Are all those large dots necessary for localization? They're really distracting me.

jf 9y ago
As I understand it, the dots are just a temporary measure while the team works on implementing better methods of detecting objects.

GuiA 9y ago

There are a lot of comments here about how Dynamicland is a bit confusing to understand, and the website is light on details. The latter is true - it would be nice if there were academic style papers describing the system, or reference source code, etc. - but I understand that right now, their time is mostly dedicated to building+fundraising, and the goal of this website is to have something rather than nothing online. That being said, Dynamicland inherits a lot from many previous subfields in computing. If anyone wants to get deeper, and try to wrap their head around what Dynamicland aims to be, here are what I think a few starting points: - Alan Kay's STEPS paper, the goal of which is to have a fully implemented OS + base libraries etc in a few thousands of lines of codes at most, by using modern patterns and abstractions. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf - Bret Victor's "Seeing Spaces" is pretty much the precursor to Dynamic Land http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/ http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/ - Ishii & Ullmer's seminal paper "Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms" (which precedes Dynamicland by 20 years, but I think many core goals are shared) https://trackr-media.tangiblemedia.org/publishedmedia/Papers/331-Tangible%20Bits%20Towards%20Seamless/Published/PDF https://trackr-media.tangiblemedia.org/publishedmedia/Papers... This paper kickstarted the whole "tangible interaction" subfield of Human Computer Interaction. If you wish to dive even deeper, I recommend: - reading Ullmer's PhD thesis, of which the previous paper is essentially a TL;DR http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~ullmer/thesis/full-noblanks.pdf http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~ullmer/thesis/full-noblanks.pdf - checking out the proceedings of TEI, the ACM conference for Tangible & Embodied Interaction (sadly you'll need an ACM digital library membership, but if you are a computer scientist it is very much worth it and you should get your job/school to pay for it if you can). https://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE271 https://dl.acm.org/event.cfm?id=RE271 I have no ties to Dynamicland besides having visited it, but I have done my graduate studies under one of the aforementioned authors and shared workplaces with people from Bret's group, so I'm happy to talk more about the whole "tangible interaction" aspect of it all.

vbuwivbiu 9y ago
Also, I saw a demo of a similar technology in the 1990s at Sussex University, in which a projector was used to create an interactive table where one could write calculations with a pen and the results would appear projected (the numbers having been recognized) and sketches could be augmented with shape-recognition

morsch 9y ago

This seems like an interesting experience. But the wording on that page is as much of a turn-off to me as the most the most cliche PR lorem ipsum. I feel dumber having read it.

westoncb 9y ago
Yep. And when you think that's bad, then you see some of the comments here which appear to be aping it for free...

misterHN 9y ago

> The entire building is the computer This is precisely the principle on which a lottery is based, in the style of The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The lottery knows that humans have a hunger, a thirst for transitioning into monsters, then returning to their normal form. This maintains balance with nature while giving the community a sense of control over the forces of anger. The society is a computer, and if the society is based on a lottery, then the lottery is a computer. The lottery is a computer, and anyone can shut it off---just convince enough people to abandon tradition. Nobody shuts it off because they have become accustomed to the way the lottery manages the population. It brings stability to the community, and freedom. It is something to live in fear of.

archagon 9y ago

I love the passion behind this project, but as with most physical or high-level UIs, the idea strikes me as overly hubristic. In my experience, truly marvelous works of interaction which expand the range of human thinking require thousands (upon thousands) of lines of code. Clearly, that kind of logic can't fit on scattered, small bits of paper. So is most of that complexity defined by whatever code keeps this thing running? (Realtalk?) Does this mean that the limits of your thinking in this environment are constrained by the skill and intent of the coders developing the system libraries? I feel this will end up becoming little more than a (really cool) room-sized toy, not something that will change the way we think and interact. Maybe boring ASCII code is simply the correct, inescapable tool for the job. Maybe expanding the range of human thinking is impossible inside a system that can't modify itself. (But maybe I'm completely wrong!) EDIT: One of the other comments mentioned that Realtalk is self-hosted on pieces of paper. Hmm, that makes this a whole lot more interesting!

benfle 9y ago
Aren't we lucky to have stumbled upon the "correct tool for the job" at our first attempt.
- archagon 9y ago
  I mean, you could argue that just as with writing, code is emergent from our biology. Brains are naturally wired for language and symbolic thought. Once computation was defined and made technically possible, perhaps the current form of programming was simply inevitable. Not that other things aren't worth trying, of course.
andars 9y ago
Here is the code for Realtalk: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg Source: https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/907253802931126272 https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/907253802931126272
enjalot 9y ago
Don't forget that programming languages get more abstract and hence more powerful with fewer lines of code. RealTalk has functions you can call to get the physical location of a piece of paper and being based on Lua makes it much more expressive than C++. You can keep digging down levels of abstraction but the interesting parts of this system are extremely accessible.

foota 9y ago

At first I thought this was a room sized vr code organization library thing? Like you could have a house with different rooms corresponding to different packages

wyck 9y ago

> And everyone gets their hands on everything! You walk by, you see what someone is making, you play with it and trade ideas, you sit down and work on it together. This happens constantly. Abandon your virtaul dreams hackers.. start to socalize and group think. And use paper.

llamataboot 9y ago
I'm not sure what kind of software you write, but every large piece of software I've ever worked on has required collaboration, and collaboration done well builds better software than any one coder could write by themselves.
- comex 9y ago
  Not the OP, but I suffer from social anxiety, and the ability to socialize outside of "real life" is a huge part of what attracted me to tech as a kid. So to me, the idea of replacing data and virtual collaboration with a big noisy room sounds… well, it sounds like a nightmare, a dystopia. It actually makes my heart race a bit just thinking about it. Of course, that doesn't mean the project is bad, just that it's profoundly unsuited to me personally. But I'm probably not the only person like that on this forum...
- programmarchy 9y ago
  In contrast, often times a core design is created by one particularly brilliant individual, which is stable enough for others to build upon. For example, Linux (Torvald), Minecraft (notch), Redis (antirez), C++ (Stroustrup), Ruby (Matz), NodeJS (Dahl), Bitcoin (Satoshi), etc... I'd be interested to hear of examples of "great" software that started off in a collaborative fashion.

apatters 9y ago

Are there some example applications created at Dynamicland that we can look at? i.e. what has actually been done with this platform to date? (Not sure applications and platform are the correct terms to use, but this concept is totally new to me)

ngokevin 9y ago
Check their Twitter https://twitter.com/Dynamicland1 https://twitter.com/Dynamicland1
- apatters 9y ago
  Fascinating stuff there!!

SolarNet 9y ago

This is a cool project. But their opinion on the open source status of their systems seems pretty entitled, arrogant even. There are a lot of questions left unanswered, and the implications of their text is disingenuous at best. Claiming their system is "beyond" open source. Yet I can't find any way of experimenting with this system myself. They fail all the tests of truly free open source software [0], let alone even the sniff test of being merely open source (can I read it?). This software is no more liberating than a "free" windows product given and taught to kids in a hope to encourage vendor lockin. They use words like "lift all people" or "agency not apps": nah, only those people who live nearby in one of the most expensive places in the world. The system is confined to their magic building, will they charge fees? are only those wealthy enough to travel and live near one be able to experience it? can anyone set up these buildings (around 2040 no less), or is there a franchise fee or agreement that is required? where is the code (scanners are a thing; what about the bootstrap code running on the servers)? They claim to be basing the model off of the internet. Decentralized agreed upon protocols. How can I talk to their system if nothing is published? If there is no code to read? How in the world is that an open decentralized protocol? How can people iterate - provide feed back - when they don't even have RFCs or any published material at all. They are promoting exactly the walled garden behavior that is the antithesis of the open model of the internet. The whole thing is suspect. I realize they are a non-profit, great. But that doesn't mean they support the ideals of a public commons like a free and open source project. It doesn't mean donations to this project will truly be helpful to everyone. Yet they are "beyond" open source. It reeks of arrogance and entitlement to claim such things. It rubs me the wrong way. Especially because it seems so cool. [0] For those who forget: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions.

vertex-four 9y ago
> Yet I can't find any way of experimenting with this system myself. Given that it's a physical space... you go to the physical space. You can pick up the source code for the entire thing there - it's self-hosting, so you can read it like any other object in Dynamicland. You can also copy it physically, using a scanner.[0] Actually finding a suitable physical space and building a community might be the the hardest part of replicating it. It's also a very early project - the first Dynamicland space opens next year. I'm sure we'll learn more about it, but the entire point of it is that it's not online - it's a physical space and a community meeting in real life, and if you want to learn about it and maybe try to replicate it, you'll have to go there. [0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg

flixic 9y ago

This looks very interesting, but the most confusing part for me is how code appears on these printed pages. Do you have to type it in computer and print to run, using physical space just to organise, not actually develop? All the examples show these pieces of paper already being there, just moved and interacted with. I'm very curious if DynamicLand code can be created without touching keyboard, and actually printing new sheets by just moving and interacting with other sheets, making it actually self-hosting. Also, their examples are very visual and quite complicated (car aerodynamics flow). Doing this from scratch might be quite challenging, unless building blocks are very smart. --- Sidenote: I'm surprised to learn that code printed on these sheets is Lua-based. Lua does not have a lot of syntax, but does have some, and I would think that any language that is meant to be created in physical space should aim for the most minimal syntax, almost none if possible. Lisp comes to mind, as I can image a physical representation of S-expressions much better than Lua code.

TheRealPomax 9y ago
I'm not sure I understand why one would expect that any language that is meant to be created in physical space should aim for the most minimal syntax. Regular folks who don't program in their daily life connect best with things they can read: presenting them with lisp is a bit like presenting them with mathmatical notation: even if those that are marginally familiar with them will say it's simple, it's exactly too difficult to be accessible for people who have _no_ familiarity with them at all. You actually want that verbosity of added syntax, because it lets people recognize something in what is inherently alien to them.
- flixic 9y ago
  You don't want syntax because you don't want Magnetic Poetry kits, having to arrange very special "structure words" in very special places, and hope that "lines" make sense. Don't think about (Lisp (notation)) -- think about the fact that the entire syntax is "this is enclosing box" (can easily be done with paper by putting smaller sheets on larger ones) and "this is the order of items within the box" (very natural to re-arrange these blocks). Lisp doesn't have lines, in that sense, and lines don't make a lot of sense in physical world. Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing about the fact that Lisp is a bit complicated to be first programming language _when writing text_. But its design is great for physical manipulation.

onikolas 9y ago

Exciting project! Looks like it could lead to some real advances in human-computer interaction. Large working area(desk, walls or the whole floor) and automatically tracking and digitizing written notes and diagrams sounds very cool. Maybe this and voice recognition will be the future of HCI if someone manages to iron out the kinks and make it seamless. But programming by putting A4 sheets side by side? I only see that being useful as an education tool.

MichaelMoser123 9y ago

is there a video/life demonstration that shows off the basic interactions of the system? So far I have not been able to understand what the system is actually doing and how to use it (searched but did not find any demos on youtube)

zeep 9y ago
They probably have a camera and a projector on the ceiling. The camera detects the dots on sheets of paper to be able to differentiate them. You will probably need a computer to code what each sheet is going to do. > Every scrap of paper has the capabilities of a full computer, while remaining a fully-functional scrap of paper. this is probably a false statement...

millettjon 9y ago

I would be happy to donate if that would support open sourcing enough to bootstrap this in other locations.

pazimzadeh 9y ago

Can we get a picture of the ceiling?