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.
