Folk Computer(folk.computer) |
Folk Computer(folk.computer) |
I’ve never been able to resolve a clear position for myself on Dynamicland. I’ve long admired Brett Victor’s work, and I have only the fondest appreciation for the project's philosophy and the enthusiasm with which Victor writes about it.
The only problem is that I’ve never been able to figure out even the first thing about how it works. It’s completely incomprehensible to me, and I just don’t know how to square the project's ideals of human-centered, community-based computing with its seemingly-impenetrable alternate universe of dot stickers and projected images.
Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap the can be embedded in everything. DynamicLand seems to be a peek into what living in that that world could be like.
I think the point of these projects is to find an alternative approach to interfacing with technology. Why not combine paper and computers?
We make the assumption that interfacing to technology is limited to keyboards, mice and fingers but there is no reason for us to limit ourselves to these approaches.
Anyone using punchcards would be amazed by keyboards and so we will be amazed by interfaces that are beyond our imagination.
As tech nerd, I love the lore of The PARC and went to visit it as soon as I moved to the Bay Area.
However, I assume it would be taught as a lesson of what not to do in a business context:
Investing in pure research often yields innovations that are opposed to existing business lines or simply too far out to see as useful by management.
That said, many companies have research arms. Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Meta, Google…
It's disturbing how little actually came out of dynamic land, and now there's a schism where the founders are pasting QR codes to hands and have as their 3rd bullet point "GPU FFI shaders"?
Does any of that scream fundamental UX research, or the future of computing?
To me, it's just another tired retread of half-baked messianic thinking that tails off into nowhere as the hero complex devolves into a series of half-baked ideas designed to scratch an individuals daily itch, rather than a central purpose.
Google had stuff like this internally for quite some time, through much later than most people would guess.
The thing is there just isn't some vastly superior paradigm sitting out there to fix computing with. The industry is mature enough that if something truly good and helpful exists, even in parts, it's quickly implemented.
One ray of light might be that the rate of change is fast enough that there are likely to be gaps emerging over the next decade.
But they're not going to be found in this sort of fashion.
I think there is a very cool version of this where the primitives are simpler and easier to compose (the composition demo I saw was a bit difficult to pull off). Then, rather than program the purpose of individual tags, you can create programs physically on the table
When Omar's post about Dynamicland [1] hit the front page last month, I was frustrated by how little information was available about the project. It seems that the folks behind Dynamicland were very against sharing anything online [2] due to concerns about "including everybody".
On the one hand, I admire their vision. But on the other hand, it doesn't feel obvious to me that holding back something like Dynamicland would help it ultimately become "available everywhere." Even their answer of "come visit us in person" isn't relevant anymore since their physical space is closed.
I'm very excited about this approach - even if it isn't open source, they've shared far more information about the way the system works. I'm sure this will inspire others and ultimately blossom into something much greater.
Edit: actually, it's open source here: https://git.folk.computer/folk
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39242467
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412
[2]: https://gist.github.com/shaunlebron/4b9a9a986fca1e7abd0bfcad...
Tbh it's really cool to see a practical walkthrough of what applying dynamicland ideas can look like, and I love the fact that there is a bunch of open source coming out of it.
I've taught a few kids a little bit of programming with things like scratch, but I think this would be infinitely more fun. I could imagine a group of kids who don't think programming is for them having a blast with something like this.
This page gives more explanation than the landing page does I think
>"This {convoluted previous story about an audience generated concert that uses computer vision} is basically the idea behind Folk Computer, a small human-computer-interaction (HCI) research project run out of a converted auto shop in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that I visited one afternoon in March. Its founders, Omar Rizwan and Andrés Cuervo, want to make an interface that is haptic and three-dimensional: no longer an image of a desktop, but a real one. Folk’s hardware consists of a tiny, monitor-less Intel computer, a ceiling-mounted camera, a projector, a printer, and lots of paper spread out on an IKEA table. Each sheet is printed with a QR-code-like marker (called an AprilTag) that corresponds to a program written on a laptop and stored on the Github cloud. The camera reads the tag and executes its instructions, which, for now, are fairly simple – “draw a green box,” for example, causes the projector to cast four green lines onto the table. Folk is part of a larger “screenless” trend in HCI, ..." (Spike Magazine, https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-emily-dickinson-...)
I guessed that following the "in the media" link would lead to a story with a brief synopsis, but the link just goes to a blogroll that's no longer got the "Folk computer" story on, searching for it gets one the above page though.
Hard pass.
Folk computing for me is a hardware/software layer stripped off the commercial abstractions that hide the inherent simplicity of the medium.
Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap they can be embedded in everything. Folk (and DynamicLand which inspired it) seems to be a peek into what living in that world could be like.
Bret plans on publishing all their experiments this Spring - https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526. I for one cannot wait.
edit 1h later: loaded now, dont know what im looking at
Also, this would be helpful for the sightless.
Typewriters, proper, pre-existed alongside punchcards for many decades before being incorporated into computer interfaces as keyboards. The fact that they did pre-exist computer keyboards may have led to them becoming the default so fast. While keyboards are amazing, they certainly weren't beyond imagination.
I guess you can say that QR codes, projectors, and cameras predate this Folk computer idea as well. But they are also far less intuitive. Using a typewriter well requires knowing basic literacy and a few new functions (carriage return, line feed, shift, etcetera). Graduating from a typewriter to a keyboard requires learning some additional functionality.
What current devices are teaching the basic functionality needed to jumpstart adaptation to this Folk computer interface?
As someone who uses punchcards regularly, I don't understand what you mean. People used a keyboard to punch cards since the 1930s or earlier. You type on a keyboard and the keypunch puts the holes in the card.
I just assumed that punch cards have gone the way of dinosaurs but always pleased to change my assumptions.
Still, it shows my point, that research that reaches too far from the company’s core biz is difficult to recognize as a success. The laser printer, was a better printer and it was an improvement to Xerox existing scan+print business.
Bell Labs also had a lot of commercial success.
It would have been easier to just make some of the inventors upper-level managers and executives of the parent company.
Given the cost of the original Xerox computer, Apple still may have eaten their lunch. Apple itself spent a lot of effort getting the Macintosh, expensive as it was, as cheap as it was.
edit: goes without saying that the best time to take on any largely successful company is approximately a decade from when they’ve been successful. that is to say, we’re on the cusps of a better payments api (ie stripe of this decade), better email (37signal’s hey), better e-commerce, etc.