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Comment by pvsnp | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering why this sounded familiar and it's from 2011. Here are various things that have been invented along the same lines as Bret mentions.

* https://dynamicland.org/ - Bret Victor's vision, looks really cool * Kinect was released (November 4, 2010) a little before this article and presented another vision of future, but the market didn't think so * Oculus now detects hands and I'm pretty hopeful this will add more gestures and similar gait detection will be huge for interfaces

All in all, the incremental changes are starting to look more like what Bret is suggesting rather than purely "pane of glass"

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Unfortunately I think Dynamicland is dead. The physical space in Oakland doesn’t exist anymore. It sounds like only Bret Victor and maybe one other person are left and Victor is relocating to a university Biology lab to try to implement his ideas there.

Source: Andy Matuschak mentions it in https://www.notion.so/blog/andy-matuschak

One thing which comes to mind is that Dynamicland is a strange laboratory. It was a space in Oakland that is no more, but it's a physical environment where the primary activity being undertaken was creating this very unusual computing system.

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And in fact, that's exactly what the principal investigator is doing right now. He's picking up and relocating the work to very interesting synthetic biology lab, where maybe now that the further development of the system will happen in a way that's meant to support this professor's research.

Two things about Dynamic Land that I love.

1) Bret brought the computer into the world, instead of bringing the world into the computer, e.g. Oculus or Vive.

2) The operating system that senses the world and reads instructions from objects is influenced by Smalltalk, and from what I understand allows for Smalltalk like programs to run on it in the form of object instructions and interactions.

Ad 2, why do you think Realtalk has any resemblance to Smalltalk?

https://colelawrence.com/posts/2018-12-06-distribution-model...

> Kinect was released (November 4, 2010) a little before this article and presented another vision of future, but the market didn't think so

The Kinect has pretty much dried up for video games, but the company that developed the first version of the Kinect for Microsoft was later purchased by Apple, and their technology underpins the FaceID tech that appears in every iOS device these days.

(Apple has also had rear-facing Lidar on their iPads & iPhones for a few years now, and I believe that it is also an evolution of the Kinect tech, but I don't know for sure.)

I am disappointed that it withered away for video games, since it was really interesting & fun technology.

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