Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit (2018)

omar.website

48 pointssurprisetalk14 comments

When it initially came out I thought it's amazing. The idea of immersive computing actually is, more than amazing, natural. And I think we're actually on the path towards that, maybe just not through Dynamicland directly.

It seems a bit like Ted Nelson's Xanadu - a vision without the end-to-end capability to realize it. Most inventions had a visitonary that had the ability to realize them to some extent or catalyze the talent to supplement it. Whether that's from being to early or not havign the right people around it, I can't brush of the exclusivist feeling that surrounds the project and last words on Bert Victor's note: "I'd appreciate if you don't as for my opinions on things". IMO you either build for yourself or for everyone else. Both are ok, but certain mixes of attitudes are incompatible.

Yeah, Bret always seemed quite defensive about Dynamicland being his Next Big Thing, incubating it in semi secret, sharing things only when they're ready, trying to follow some top-down timeline of the next 50 years, etc.

I guess he genuinely believes(d?) that he's building the next printing press or something like that, and therefore any tiny bit of interference could be detrimental to his grand vision.

For a while there were many, many more people excited and interested about Dynamicland than there were opportunities to actually try it and experiment with it. If you were genuinely excited about the vision, but 1) didn't live near Oakland and 2) didn't know people there who could let you in, there was no way for you to interact with the project. It's always a shame when that energy just dissipates without becoming productive.

In my opinion, if Dynamicland had been open source from the start, shared with as many as possible, so that enterprising teachers/librarians/hobbyists could've had deployed it themselves, maybe it'd have had a greater chance of truly morphing into something big.

More like what folk.computer is doing now, although maybe it's a bit too late now that that initial lift is gone.

But what do I know, I'm just a guy on the internet.

in case you wonder what's happening in Dynamicland land, here was the last update from Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/July2023/

Also, Omar and some other people have been working on the very cool Folk Computer which is inspired by Dynamicland: https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots

Thank you so much for sharing this, super exciting to see some open source designs coming out of the research there.

I’m optimistic for interactive and physical programming to take a foothold in our world. How many more phone apps do we really need? Aren’t many of the user optimized social apps wreaking havoc on the youth?

Shifting thinking back to extending human creativity and making programming available to less technical audiences might change our technology use to a less neck craning, social interaction devoid format.

These things take time and significant breakthroughs. See - https://www.lively-kernel.org. Over a decade ago Dan Ingalls and team built a Smalltalk inspired JavaScript flavor. IDE and language combined.

That has morphed into lively.next which is used by at least one commercial company to develop animated visualizations.

I hope to see this type of programming expanded. I had a SMART board in middle school - think figma on a big white board - and teachers came up with lots of creatives ways to engage us and get us to work with each other through doodling on the board.

Will that reach the professional world? Can NASA doodle a spaceship to the moon? Maybe with AI tool development, the idea of computers filling in the technical detail for user drawn plans isn’t impossible.

Discussed at the time:

Notes from Dynamicland: Geokit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17700612 - Aug 2018 (10 comments)

> In Realtalk, most of that code falls away – provided that you represent your objects as individual physical pages. Once you have physical pages, you automatically get the operations of the physical world: placing and picking up objects, moving and grouping objects in space, pointing objects at each other, and so on.

This was the key part that helped me click into what was special about what Dynamicland was doing. Instead of implementing lists, it just relies on the physical world to "implement" lists for you.

Of course, a lot of this is about coding on paper. I would wonder if it is possible to run the projection on screen instead. Say I have three iPads; their placement can likely be some input. The projection will not get a resolution comparable to a screen soon.

One issue with iPad is the pencil does not automatically reconnect to another one after touching anther screen.

Dynamicland was amazing. So far ahead of its time, yet also so utterly without a practical real world application. So dedicated are they to the idea of dynamic code running the space that they wrote the kernel on a whiteboard, and if anyone wanted between the camera and the whiteboard with the code on it, the whole space would crash. Now THAT is dynamic.

Not at all. They're currently doing some playtesting with computational biology labs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230514180550/https://dynamicla...

The dual of AR, if you will!

This is my first time seeing Dynamicland in a few years, and it's interesting: my perspective is flipped.

Instead of seeing it as "computing in 2100", I see "ehhh, you say you could get the iPad out, hope you don't have embarrassing notifications, unlock it, and look through 24 rainbow gradient icons with red bubbles"...

...is laying out 10 things better? ...is having to putting a piece of glass against a big map, then rotating it, causing it to zoom in on a nearby sheet of paper, better than pinching?

I want to write off that reaction immediately as being older and jaded, but who knows.

If it helps, I don't think there's any glass involved. The IR "dial" appears to be made of white paper like everything else; you can see the map "behind" it because it's actually being projected from above.

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