This is almost the opposite of what I envisioned when reading the title "folk computer", which makes me think of a computing experience that's fundamentally simple, convivial, and transparent to users, something like what's captured by the concept of "permacomputing". While the ideas explored here are no doubt interesting and probably important to consider, they seem like they require an enormous amount of abstraction and complexity to implement, while at the same time remaining somewhat impenetrable to the user. For example, using QR codes guarantees that the semantics of any given symbol are impossible to determine at a glance. Is it really an improvement over the mouse-and-screen paradigm to paste QR codes to your hands (the printed hands in the demo are actually two left hands), and set up a rig that requires camera mounts, projectors, and a large flat surface dedicated to object manipulation with extremely specific, non-intuitive semantics? I can't help but wonder how this would ever generalize to the number of uses or amount of convenience that people were able to wring out of even simple text-based terminals.
Yeah, I was pretty excited at first, hoping someone is showing their forward-looking human-friendly computer, encompassing all of the best principles of permacomputing and frugal computing... Was not expecting some kind of "real-world computing" platform. It's definitely interesting, but not at all what I expected based on the name.
If you want a folk computer, it needs to read standard file types, have a little attack surface as possible, run off batteries charged by its environment, and otherwise be similar to a phone with half-a-dozen very spacious NVME drives packed in.
The moment I saw papercraft, computer vision, and a projector, I thought this had to have some relation.
I’ve never been able to resolve a clear position for myself on Dynamicland. I’ve long admired Brett Victor’s work, and I have only the fondest appreciation for the project's philosophy and the enthusiasm with which Victor writes about it.
The only problem is that I’ve never been able to figure out even the first thing about how it works. It’s completely incomprehensible to me, and I just don’t know how to square the project's ideals of human-centered, community-based computing with its seemingly-impenetrable alternate universe of dot stickers and projected images.
It's a bit unfortunate that people can't look past the projections and the dot frames/QR codes. Those are just a means to an end, which is trying to simulate a world where all objects have the ability to compute and can be easily reprogrammed on the fly.
Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap the can be embedded in everything. DynamicLand seems to be a peek into what living in that that world could be like.
Came here to say the same - Bret Victor is doing similar things[1].
I think the point of these projects is to find an alternative approach to interfacing with technology. Why not combine paper and computers?
We make the assumption that interfacing to technology is limited to keyboards, mice and fingers but there is no reason for us to limit ourselves to these approaches.
Anyone using punchcards would be amazed by keyboards and so we will be amazed by interfaces that are beyond our imagination.
> Anyone using punchcards would be amazed by keyboards and so we will be amazed by interfaces that are beyond our imagination.
Typewriters, proper, pre-existed alongside punchcards for many decades before being incorporated into computer interfaces as keyboards. The fact that they did pre-exist computer keyboards may have led to them becoming the default so fast. While keyboards are amazing, they certainly weren't beyond imagination.
I guess you can say that QR codes, projectors, and cameras predate this Folk computer idea as well. But they are also far less intuitive. Using a typewriter well requires knowing basic literacy and a few new functions (carriage return, line feed, shift, etcetera). Graduating from a typewriter to a keyboard requires learning some additional functionality.
What current devices are teaching the basic functionality needed to jumpstart adaptation to this Folk computer interface?
> Anyone using punchcards would be amazed by keyboards
As someone who uses punchcards regularly, I don't understand what you mean. People used a keyboard to punch cards since the 1930s or earlier. You type on a keyboard and the keypunch puts the holes in the card.
Which make and model of keypunch do people use these days? I thought that IBM had discontinued the Model 029 ages ago (along with all the other unit record equipment).
I was gonna say, this sounds a lot like continuing the research of Dynamicland, which itself contained research from CDA, VPRI, and other groups. Why is it so hard to find a consistent funder of basic research like PARC in the 70s?
Hmm, thanks for the interesting article. Probably knew that at one time but forgot lol.
Still, it shows my point, that research that reaches too far from the company’s core biz is difficult to recognize as a success. The laser printer, was a better printer and it was an improvement to Xerox existing scan+print business.
when a business has an r&d department it's inherently suicidal to consider any current activity as ‘core biz’ especially in a competition. your research department’s objective is to move the puck into new locations, hopefully evading your competitors, and your job as mother institution is to skate there. settling into any so-called core business is contra good business thinking. starting an r&d department isn’t.
Makes you wonder how the mythos that Xerox dropped the ball with PARC is so pervasive in our culture, or that it was net unprofitable. Probably the early scrappy 'garage engineering' mythology surrounding Apple plays into it?
Lesson: Don't develop innovations that are too advanced for management to understand, because they will pass and let the rest of the world eat their lunch.
I think the actual lesson learned was to develop these research departments as incubators where the inventors are expected, and trained, to become entrepreneurs who spin out companies that the parent company owns part of.
It would have been easier to just make some of the inventors upper-level managers and executives of the parent company.
Given the cost of the original Xerox computer, Apple still may have eaten their lunch. Apple itself spent a lot of effort getting the Macintosh, expensive as it was, as cheap as it was.
not really. from my study (of both xerox and other companies with similar fate), it’s success that killed them. when you have a hugely successful product that people can’t seem to live without, and businesses can’t operate without, it’s extraordinarily difficult to plan and execute its demise in favor of something new. your business executives, skilled in the arts of racing to bottom lines, won’t side with you. they’d rather go down with the ship than keep jumping every 5 years or so.
edit: goes without saying that the best time to take on any largely successful company is approximately a decade from when they’ve been successful. that is to say, we’re on the cusps of a better payments api (ie stripe of this decade), better email (37signal’s hey), better e-commerce, etc.
From what I had gathered, today's VC incubators and academic-affiliated incubators work on the inventor -> entrepreneur model (or at least entrepreneur -> inventor model).
Honestly and respectfully, would you be clambering to fund this?
It's disturbing how little actually came out of dynamic land, and now there's a schism where the founders are pasting QR codes to hands and have as their 3rd bullet point "GPU FFI shaders"?
Does any of that scream fundamental UX research, or the future of computing?
To me, it's just another tired retread of half-baked messianic thinking that tails off into nowhere as the hero complex devolves into a series of half-baked ideas designed to scratch an individuals daily itch, rather than a central purpose.
Google had stuff like this internally for quite some time, through much later than most people would guess.
The thing is there just isn't some vastly superior paradigm sitting out there to fix computing with. The industry is mature enough that if something truly good and helpful exists, even in parts, it's quickly implemented.
One ray of light might be that the rate of change is fast enough that there are likely to be gaps emerging over the next decade.
But they're not going to be found in this sort of fashion.
Is computing good enough as a literacy that anyone can use it to model complex ideas? Computers are simulators and can be used to model almost anything, sadly most people just use it to model old media (images, movies, text documents). As an example, can your [insert elderly relative] program it the same way he/she can probably string together multiple words to express a complicated idea.
Just saw a demo of this last week. The most exciting use case was when multiple tags “programs” composed. For example, one program measures a value, passes that to one that accumulates values, and another that plots.
I think there is a very cool version of this where the primitives are simpler and easier to compose (the composition demo I saw was a bit difficult to pull off). Then, rather than program the purpose of individual tags, you can create programs physically on the table
This is so refreshing! As sibling commenter [0] mentions, this is clearly inspired by Dynamicland, and even uses the "Claim/When" syntax that Dynamicland uses to implement their "Realtalk" operating system.
When Omar's post about Dynamicland [1] hit the front page last month, I was frustrated by how little information was available about the project. It seems that the folks behind Dynamicland were very against sharing anything online [2] due to concerns about "including everybody".
On the one hand, I admire their vision. But on the other hand, it doesn't feel obvious to me that holding back something like Dynamicland would help it ultimately become "available everywhere." Even their answer of "come visit us in person" isn't relevant anymore since their physical space is closed.
I'm very excited about this approach - even if it isn't open source, they've shared far more information about the way the system works. I'm sure this will inspire others and ultimately blossom into something much greater.
Tbh it's really cool to see a practical walkthrough of what applying dynamicland ideas can look like, and I love the fact that there is a bunch of open source coming out of it.
The button is pretty amusing, but The rest of the site does a better job of motivating it.
I've taught a few kids a little bit of programming with things like scratch, but I think this would be infinitely more fun. I could imagine a group of kids who don't think programming is for them having a blast with something like this.
I think a better overview is under the "Towards a folk computer" link on the main page (perhaps the submission link should be changed?). Essentially (if I understand correctly) they want to let you control computer by moving things in the physical world: mainly items on a real tabletop. Sort of anti-virtual reality, in a way!
Not to sound dismissive, because this is cool, but this pretty solidly AR, just instead of a headset you're using a projector. I don't think it'd be too difficult to port this to vr headset of choice
Exactly, websites like this need straplines and a clear "about" page.
>"This {convoluted previous story about an audience generated concert that uses computer vision} is basically the idea behind Folk Computer, a small human-computer-interaction (HCI) research project run out of a converted auto shop in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that I visited one afternoon in March. Its founders, Omar Rizwan and Andrés Cuervo, want to make an interface that is haptic and three-dimensional: no longer an image of a desktop, but a real one. Folk’s hardware consists of a tiny, monitor-less Intel computer, a ceiling-mounted camera, a projector, a printer, and lots of paper spread out on an IKEA table. Each sheet is printed with a QR-code-like marker (called an AprilTag) that corresponds to a program written on a laptop and stored on the Github cloud. The camera reads the tag and executes its instructions, which, for now, are fairly simple – “draw a green box,” for example, causes the projector to cast four green lines onto the table. Folk is part of a larger “screenless” trend in HCI, ..." (Spike Magazine, https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-emily-dickinson-...)
I guessed that following the "in the media" link would lead to a story with a brief synopsis, but the link just goes to a blogroll that's no longer got the "Folk computer" story on, searching for it gets one the above page though.
I thought it was a pithy comment that quickly indicated that, like emacs or vi versus pico or nano versus notepad, that this seems like a system that would segment people into lusers, users, and powerusers even harder than modern computing interfaces.
Is this a paper computer? If so, the first page of the site does a poor job of explaining what it is, and even then going to “make a button” page it’s still not that clear. Where is the about page or some kind of introduction?
It's a bit unfortunate that people can't look past the projections and the dot frames/QR codes. Those are just a means to an end, which is trying to simulate a world where all objects have the ability to compute and can be easily reprogrammed on the fly.
Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap they can be embedded in everything. Folk (and DynamicLand which inspired it) seems to be a peek into what living in that world could be like.
This would be cool with a "swarm" of "cold-tech" displays. Like, a bunch of small e-ink displays. Feels like something like elixir/erlang vm would do great with.
I started on the "Let's make a button" page and got very confused. IIUC the missing part is "you point a camera at stuff and a program on your computer does things in response, including sending output back to the stuff via a projector". Printing things onto bits of paper and folding them up doesn't cause anything much to happen on its own.
