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Comment by DANK_YACHT | Hacker News Reader

Hands feel and manipulate things because they evolved in a physical world where that type of interaction was most efficient. The digital world opens up new possibilities that don't need physical manipulation to be controlled. It feels a bit luddite to restrict interaction just to physical manipulation. I agree, sometimes designers go too far, e.g. in the case of touch-screen hvac controls in cars. However, there are also examples where physical manipulation is not desired. For instance, the smartphone is so powerful because it's not tied to one physical mode of operation. It can have buttons for a calculator, or a keyboard, or serve as a book, or a video game controller, or...

Given that this was written in 2011, I commend the author for having an opinion, but it has aged rather like milk to me.

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> For instance, the smartphone is so powerful because it's not tied to one physical mode of operation. It can have buttons for a calculator, or a keyboard, or serve as a book, or a video game controller, or...

Smartphones are powerful because the interface is reconfigurable in software. That's orthogonal to whether the interface is tactile or not.

Imagine you go to choose between two smartphones:

1. One is like you have today: a flat surface of glass with colored pixels underneath.

2. The other supports a surface that physically changes in response to the application. Open the calculator, and a grid of number buttons appear. Tapping one gives the satisfying click of an old calculator. Switch to a synthesizer and a row of piano keys appear. The have the bounce of a weighted piano and play louder or softer based on how hard you press them. Open a game and a D-pad and joystick materialize.

I know which one I'd pick.

The author, Bret Victor, put his money where is mouth was and founded a tangible computing organization named Dynamic Land[0] that is funded in part by the research organization led by Alan Kay.

Dynamic Land might be the most interesting approach to collaborative computing in person that I’ve seen to date.

Bret designed the system, wrote the operating system, and the libraries used to interact with the OS via physical objects. It’s awesome.

[0] https://dynamicland.org/

I find Tilt Five[0] to be 100x more interesting than Dynamic Land. They don't serve entirely the same purpose, but I think it illustrates the difference between clinging to the past (Dynamic Land) and embracing a digital future (Tilt Five). Both solutions are powered by projectors and sensors, but Tilt Five pushes the envelope a lot further than Dynamic Land.

[0] https://www.tiltfive.com/

I’ll have a look at this, thank you.

In what ways do you feel like TiltFive supersedes what Dynamic Land is doing?

[EDIT]: After reviewing the marketing materials, it looks to me that this project is orthogonal to the goals of Dynamic Land, and they don’t really serve the same purpose.

1) Dynamic Land is intended to allow for computing by interacting with real physical objects, and seeing the outputs displayed back in the real world without augmented reality hardware.

2) TiltFive seems intended to allow for holographic display of traditional or specialized game content onto physical objects. More like advanced AR than tangible or physical computing .

I guess my point is that what Dynamic Land is doing is not compelling, so there will never be a perfect analog to compare it to, unless you compare it to another initiative that is also not compelling. Maybe Dynamic Land makes a cool demo, but the approach isn't capable of producing anything generally interesting. As far as I can tell, there have not been any updates on the initiative since 2019, so it looks like Dynamic Land might be dead. What I find interesting about Tilt Five is that they bring computation into the physical space. It might not be tactile, but it's at least usable for something. Another comparison to Dynamic Land is that Dynamic Land tries to create computation in one shared environment. Tilt Five, on the other hand, allows two people in separate physical environments to share a digital environment. These are just two examples of how a digital-first approach is more compelling than Dynamic Land's analog-first approach.

> I guess my point is that what Dynamic Land is doing is not compelling

Have you used it? My gut feeling is that Dynamicland is likely something that has to be experienced to be understood. I saw Bret Victor present on Dynamicland at a design conference, and there are tons of little happy and unexpected accidents that come from people using it and experiencing it. It's stuff that you can't throw into bullet points.

Conversely, I find Tilt Five to be nowhere near as interesting to me as Dynamic Land. Tilt Five doesn't push the envelope on computing further as far as I can see, but rather is just an expensive game peripheral for windows and android phones; Dynamic land is attempting to develop and enable new forms of media, especially communal media. The two projects shouldn't be held in the same breath IMO.

Besides, the Tilt Five developer program YouTube commercial[1] is the worst. It's like an xbox 360 reveal video at CES or a Qualcomm presentation about digital natives.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-7lHqyBQeg

You're creating an artificial dichotomy here with empty buzzwords.

What exactly makes one the opposite of the other?

The question should be, can we have a device with a programmable real-time tactile environment?

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