Laser Socks – a sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing
glench.com
glench.com
The Dynamicland stuff is particularly fun due to the promise of accessibility. A mature version of this vision would be tremendously exciting for me as a high school teacher.
When I read about VR in education I mostly see "experiences" as a defining value of the platform. This is fine, but less interesting than the potential for augmented environments to enhance my nuts-and-bolts professional practice. I want to be able to create personalized tools for interacting with media and ideas (extant and live creations) and managing interpersonal communications/interactions in my room. I can see immediate value in the ability to build branching lesson plans with trigger-able subroutines to provide more individually appropriate experiences to students. I feel strongly about non-linear learning opportunities, but they're logistically difficult. Likewise, to create modifiable one-to-one/one-to-some/one-to-many communications channels to smooth the experience of working with 30-35 people when I can only be in one place at a time (and to mollify the anxieties/anger/angst of being a teenager expected to publicly perform in a crowd).
There are any number of small tools I would like to build. I know what problems I want to fix to improve my efficacy, and I don't need polished consumer products to do that.
If "Hypercard for the World" allowed me to start hacking together useful tools for myself, I would shower them with love.
On the AR side of things, Rainbows End is a well conceived vision. I'd appreciate suggestions for other AR visions in science fiction (or otherwise).
Consider software development teams. It's probably optimal for the team to be all co-located so they can communicate in person. But the internet today enables dispersed teams (that otherwise wouldn't be able to work together, e.g. for financial reasons) to pretty effectively collaborate on software.
The internet is providing additional options, that provides additional benefit. VR could provide collaborative benefits along these lines.
This is tangential, but as a blind person [1], I wonder if you would be uncomfortable working together in person with someone who can't make eye contact and doesn't even know that you're looking at them. I don't mean to be confrontational; I'm just curious. Eye contact has always been an abstract concept for me, and somehow, I never thought about how it might actually be important in a working relationship until I read your comment. Have you, by chance, ever worked with a blind person?
[1]: Actually, low vision (I can read text up close, and my limited sight helps some with orientation and mobility), but I can't make eye contact, and don't really understand the significance of it.
All eye contact is is a signal that the person's attention is on you.
My point about looking someone in the eye was a synecdoche for the more generally the value I feel in-person interaction has that could be lost if I and my students were using VR goggles.
My ability to "read" students is a big part of my professional practice.
It seems like this goes beyond VR, and is reflective of the design mindset in tech at large. Creating canned, linear, self-contained, one-size-fits-all flows instead of giving users tools that they can combine/contrast/etc into more powerful abstractions that fit their individual use cases.
Such a barren middle ground.
Seems like it's a pretty natural consequence of how a consumer based culture thinks and defines success.
Some people could really enjoy escaping their lived world. Imagine if the costs on VR came down enough so that a person living in a slum in Calcutta or Rio de Janeiro or Chicago could walk through the Taj Mahal, or Petra, or sit in a Harvard University lecture hall? What if they could just make the smell go away for an hour?
It would greatly improve the quality of their life even without solving the much tougher challenge of getting them out of poverty.
Considered expansively enough, virtual reality for all five senses could be a substitute for almost any consumption experience. People could eat protein paste and have it taste like filet mignon. They could walk between the same two rooms in their house but feel like they were in Versailles. VR could massively reduce the global demand for energy and materials.
At the same time, the person in VR would be giving learnable information to the robot while they are controlling it (e.g. like a driver for a self-driving car). Eventually, you could wade the robot off of VR and it would be able to carry out the task. So, VR could also be a way to teach robots.
westoncb's comment downthread points to another resource digging into B. Victor's recent work.
> The theme was to make hybrid physical/digital games using a prototype research system Bret Victor and Robert Ochshorn had made called Hypercard in the World. This system was like an operating system for an entire room — it connected cameras, projectors, computers, databases, and laser pointers throughout the lab to let people write programs that would magically add projected graphics and interactivity to physical objects.
In the same way Smalltalk was about virtual objects computing and communicating with each other through a common environment, Hypercard in the World was about physical objects computing and communicating with each other. The next iteration of the system is even called Realtalk as a play on "Smalltalk" but for the physical world.
There were lots of other demos made in this system, but those will be published at some later point...maybe.
I think that's an overly narrow characterisation of VR with unnecessarily pejorative connotations.
For example, perhaps VR will let people interact or collaborate with others in ways AR wouldn't be conducive to?
I'm not saying "VR is better than AR". Different media have different characteristics and uses.
Similarly, Laser Socks is a fun demo by itself, but what we as researchers hope it points toward is a new type of computing that instead of isolating humans in artificial digital worlds, provides a medium of expression that is continuous and integrated with our physical and social worlds
So this is one 'application' built on an 'OS' developed by Bret Victor and Robert Ochshorn which was called Hypercard in the World, though the latest version is called Realtalk. More info here: https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/
Another insight into computing, i think, was TradeWars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars
Now make it LaserSocks 4-player - and have non-players call out the player who should be taken out first/betting on who will win :-)
One day soon we will all have cameras and projectors and sensors in our home and office environments and be able to improvise new interactions.
Seems ... plausible. Where do I get a block of wood the right shape then?
edit: that's funny "two lines of code" then mentions the hypercard that detects the laser pointer
> Players try to point a laser pointer at their opponent's socks while dodging their opponent's laser. Whenever they score a hit, the health meter closest to their opponent's play area fills up with blue light. Whoever gets their opponent's meter to fill up first wins.
The light on the ground is a piece of posterboard is that has graphics projection-mapped onto it to signify a person's "health" in the game. It would be cool if there were a physically-actuated health bar like you're describing, though!
The module that detected laser dots was like a page of code. It really wasn't complicated at all.
I thought it was like a back light panel of a computer display pretty cool it's a projection if I read what you said right.
Yeah I wasn't 100% serious of what I said, it's like I don't know if this is a good analogy "yeah it's easy with the push of my foot, I can turn oil into 60 mph" with regard to a car.
For more follow @Dynamicland1 on twitter.
http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/
Edit: I was able to find the HN post as well:
But I've been a manager for 15 years and my real geek skills suck
Help me!