I went to a meeting at Dynamicland a few years ago, and got to spend a few days playing with it and chatting with people.
The positives are many: I think it's awesome to conceive of computers outside the actual computer boxes, especially in an educational setting. I think the notion of "collaboration" is way more engaging when it's kids standing shoulder-to-shoulder and actually pushing pieces of paper around and arguing about things out loud, rather than "collaborating" on a Google Doc, sitting at different computers. I also think that this can be enlarged: all sorts of working meetings could be improved by people standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a table and pushing around tangible objects, with simple programming about how they'll interact.
My negatives are what I took away from this, and may be incorrect or out-of-date, so feel free to jump in if I'm wrong, but I felt that Bret Victor was very much a purist regarding his vision, and had no desire to help spawn clones or variants of Dynamicland anywhere else. In many ways this may be laudable, but it felt like he was protecting his baby from going out into the wild, which has meant that the spread of ideas and possibilities has been greatly curtailed. It seems like it will only ever be destined to be a tiny playground for Bret and the few friends working with him.
> I also think that this can be enlarged: all sorts of working meetings could be improved by people standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a table and pushing around tangible objects, with simple programming about how they'll interact.
I've worked at a company (~30 people) that used a physical kanban blackboard, with slips of paper and magnets.
The slips started out hand-written. Then someone made a printer. Then someone realized there was still too much information being held on Redmine. Then someone connected the printer with Redmine. Then we decided to keep the long descriptions in Redmine, but priorities and assignments on kanban. Then someone decided we need to keep ticket priorities and progress on Redmine as well, because computers are actually better when you need to sort and filter a mass of tickets. Then someone noticed it's difficult to locate either the physical representation of a ticket, or its copy on Redmine, to keep both in sync. Before I left, we were throwing around ideas like printing QR codes on the tickets, or using CV/OCR. The printer would also get jammed, the paper tickets got lost, we never had enough magnets, and I hate chalk.
We've had a very unusual (in my experience) policy of no remote / no WFH, I didn't mind but I wonder how much more of an obstacle it would have been if remote work was more common. It would certainly make zero sense in the pandemic world, but I didn't stick around long enough to find out.
I see how that might be constructed as a negative, but IMO it's too early to tell whether that's a genuine setback to the project.
"Protecting his baby" might be a very wise decision at this point, if only because of how the reception generally goes; pigeonholing the project into something like "an AR coding environment" or "visual programming with projectors" is a very real risk that could damage the project's aims - even "clones" such as https://paperprograms.org/ make it abundantly clear that they are not attempting to be an "opensource Dynamicland".
It's only been 3 years since it was founded. While that might be generally considered an eternity in tech-time, I feel it's barely enough to get one's feet wet given the scale of the project, which seems to aim to be decades long. Besides, the roadmap they've got on their website mentions 2022 as the year they go public - so, I personally am stoked for what that will bring.
If the goal is to prevent misconceptions about the project’s goals from becoming mainstream, then partially withholding access and information about the project seems like a poor way to achieve that goal.
People will just make assumptions about what the project is based on the photos/videos they see, but won’t absorb the deeper meaning because they won’t get to actually use it.
If you read their material you'll see that they are expecting the project to "meet the world" in 2022 and are looking to achieve widespread adoption by 2040. As others have mentioned this might seem like forever in tech-startup terms, but they aren't aiming to just make a "AR-projector setup", they have much more ambitious goals, so it seems reasonable to also work on longer timelines, including keeping the "baby" in the crib until it's ready to walk instead of crawl.
@SamBam, the concern about Bret maybe not asking for help and just working more in the open concerned me too. It's a large endeavor to try to popularize something like what he's doing. I assume a sense of showmanship and worrying about people misrepresenting it are a bit part of the dynamics. Perhaps sponsorship exclusivity, but that's more speculative.
Bret had a whole lot to do with the UX paradigms on the original iPhone that most of the world is still using today. It seems so intuitive now, but compared to feature phones or early smartphones, the world he helped pioneer was a cohesive and malleable mental/physical model. He knows the consequences missing the mark. If he truly wants to help human thought level up as he’s extolled for years, doing so with deliberate care and field data is of great importance. That said, we need physical, social computing in a big way. Zoom’s limitations have been made clear to all, and we’re primed for a new paradigm.
I gave Bret the same feedback. My point was that if he could package up a smaller version of it (say with a pico projector and a simple webcam) then you could have a ton of creative efforts happen in parallel. There are a ton of use cases for the home and for schools and I'm sad that the potential there is not fully realized..
It's got a technological problem which is very much like augmented reality, picoprojectors, and such.
A movie projector projects onto an otherwise dark screen, but this thing projects on a surface: your black level is going to be good light for "seeing".
The projectors have to be pretty bright, outside light controlled and the sensor array would have to be pretty robust.
A good installation would be pretty expensive, but there must be a $1000 version that's possible.
The positives are many: I think it's awesome to conceive of computers outside the actual computer boxes, especially in an educational setting. I think the notion of "collaboration" is way more engaging when it's kids standing shoulder-to-shoulder and actually pushing pieces of paper around and arguing about things out loud, rather than "collaborating" on a Google Doc, sitting at different computers. I also think that this can be enlarged: all sorts of working meetings could be improved by people standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a table and pushing around tangible objects, with simple programming about how they'll interact.
My negatives are what I took away from this, and may be incorrect or out-of-date, so feel free to jump in if I'm wrong, but I felt that Bret Victor was very much a purist regarding his vision, and had no desire to help spawn clones or variants of Dynamicland anywhere else. In many ways this may be laudable, but it felt like he was protecting his baby from going out into the wild, which has meant that the spread of ideas and possibilities has been greatly curtailed. It seems like it will only ever be destined to be a tiny playground for Bret and the few friends working with him.