Dynamicland 2024

I had the good fortune of taking a field trip there in 2018. The video is a very good overview of the project. One interesting artifact of "the real world simulates itself" is version control. At Dynamicland, each version of a program is a sheet of paper (with a unique set of fiducials along the edges). If you want to edit a program, you grab a keyboard and point it at the program. A text editor comes up; you make…

Super exciting Bret Victor publicly launched this project! On a related note, A professor at MIT, Hiroshi Ishii, has done a lot of work in tangible user interfaces around 2003-2005, you can see more work here: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/ Definately the visions/goals are differently motivated, but interesting to see more examples of adding tangible control to computing.

If you're looking for more concrete details on what it's actually like to make things at Dynamicland, I recommend this writeup by Omar Rizwan. (from 2018, so doesn't reflect recent progress, but it's still helpful for getting a feel for the place): https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/ I also wrote a short explanation of some little experiments I did there when I visited a couple years ago: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/projects/dynamicland.html

The core insight, in my eyes at least, of the Dynamicland project is that a projector + a camera is more interesting for deploying computation in a manner that permeates the physical world than screens. Weiser’s vision [0] could not see beyond the boundaries of the display and unnecessarily constrained itself as a result. But we have cheap megapixel CCDs and projectors now (and the GPU power to get something useful out of “neural network” systems, although I’m not sure…