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The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

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Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#41

Post by mncharity »

setr wrote: post #32
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR has a huge input problem, you can't touch any of the 3D stuff, you are basically left waving hands in the air. Bret Victor's lab is going in the other direction of tangible objects with digital projections.

There's really no reason we can't treat it like navigating a video game; movement and interation through the normal kb+m/controller model; the helmet is just the monitor, with a bigger pov (due to head turning) Im not sure why there's a belief that you need to pretend you physically exist in the vr world; you just need to be able to interact with, and navigate, for it to be sufficiently valuable. ie imagine using it…

Creating HMDs with an angular resolution sufficient for being a screen substitute, is still a work in progress. Otherwise, I image what you describe might have happened.

The available market was gaming. With its emphasis on "presence", high frame rates, high polygon counts, dislike of visual artifacts and blur, and tolerance of low angular resolution.

And even now, as parts become available to create a better screen substitute, the market isn't seen as worth pursuing yet. But 2018 should see a higher-resolution generation of gaming HMDs. And there's Varjo to watch/hope for, though it will be $10k-ish.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#42

Post by mncharity »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #40
mncharity wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tangible objects with digital projections You can also use tangible objects with XR. It might be useful for sorting things, like system subparts, and thinking with your hands. You can fit camera tracking markers on 1 cm wooden cubes. > you can't touch any of the 3D stuff The current controller "tock" impulse haptics can be surprisingly effective. Your brain fills in a lot. But no, no force feedback or individual fi…

I'm not as pessimistic as Bret Victor is about this (see http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi... ), but ya, haptics is an obvious solution. I think voice input will be even more important, once we get conversational UIs going, XR will work much better with some pointing and voice input (as in Iron Man).

> I'm not as pessimistic as Bret Victor [...] ABriefRant

I'd actually go one step further than that "rant".

In the real world, small physical motions usually have little control significance. Mouse movement and keyboards are among the many exceptions. With XR's hand tracking, that can change. For example, while gaming is focused on "feeling like it's real", so game hands overlap real hands, for getting work done, it's nice to have stretchy arms, so you can reach across the room to grab things. For optimal long-term ergonomics, you want a mix - sometimes you want the exercise of waving your arms, and sometimes you want to achieve the same end by merely twitching a hand resting on a knee or keyboard.

So not only did the video reduce all of human motion vocabulary, including gaze and voice, down to a single finger over a sad UI, but even that single finger was used in an impoverished manner. ;)

> XR will work much better with some pointing and voice input

Eye tracking as well. "Look; point; click" has a seemingly redundant step.

When someone is watching an education video, say IBM's atom animation[1], you want to both be able to field common questions like "What are the ripples?", but also notice that they are looking at the ripples, and volunteer related content.

One can do prototyping now, with WebVR, google speech recognition, and in-browser or google voice synthesis.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#43

Post by bloaf »

fairpx wrote: post #2

It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)

I feel like ZUIs never got a fair shake, and could really do well with touchscreens.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#44

Post by bloaf »

fairpx wrote: post #6
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can redesign the UI using Canvas, no need to do it at the OS level. It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, naturalistic UIs (NUIs) were tried a decade ago, but they were found to not actually be more usable.

I’ve been following OS UI experiments for some years and the problem with all of them was that they took an approach that sounded cool but wasn’t really practical. From 3D desktops to strange card based interfaces that wanted to replicate the messy physical desk. I think the key is to redesign the GUI by removing stuff instead of adding fancy new ways of shuffling files.

I agree to a certain extent, and I think we can see that in the the evolution of video game interfaces. If you look at games like System Shock 2 to Bioshock, you see that the interfaces have evolved in the direction of finding ways of simplifying the information presented to the player and eliminating irrelevant information.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#45

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mncharity wrote: post #42
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not as pessimistic as Bret Victor is about this (see http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi... ), but ya, haptics is an obvious solution. I think voice input will be even more important, once we get conversational UIs going, XR will work much better with some pointing and voice input (as in Iron Man).

> I'm not as pessimistic as Bret Victor [...] ABriefRant I'd actually go one step further than that "rant". In the real world, small physical motions usually have little control significance. Mouse movement and keyboards are among the many exceptions. With XR's hand tracking, that can change. For example, while gaming is focused on "feeling like it's real", so game hands overlap real hands, for getting work done, it'…

Voice input on its own is almost worthless.

A conversational interface is a huge step beyond voice, is much more than that. We aren't nearly there yet.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#46

Post by mindcrime »

flavio81 wrote: post #4

You know your article was worth writing when my idol, Sir Alan Curtis Kay, Smalltalk inventor, takes the time to comment on it!

Fun note for those who weren't aware: he's been known to post here at HN from time to time as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#47

Post by pjmlp »

gumby wrote: post #24
pjmlp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the Xerox PARC papers, there was a lot of shared work between the Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar teams. Actually some of the REPL and debugging features in Mesa/Cedar were done because they wanted to appeal to the Interlisp-D and Smalltalk users, while offering a strong type development environment.

Indeed I worked at PARC (at ISL, using Interlisp) and used all three platforms. This article was about the '73 Alto implementation though, which preceded the D machines (and preceded my time at PARC by a decade as well). At that time Interlisp was PDP-10 only and had no GUI.

Yeah, I should have paid attention to the nickname. :)

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#48

Post by jcelerier »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #3
fairpx wrote: post #2

It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)

You can redesign the UI using Canvas, no need to do it at the OS level. It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, naturalistic UIs (NUIs) were tried a decade ago, but they were found to not actually be more usable.

> It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though,

More like, it has been shown in numerous research that it was quite good and efficient

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#49

Post by d-crane »

KGIII wrote: post #34
bsaul wrote: post #14

i wonder what's today's equivalent to this pionnering technologies... biotech gene editing ? quantum computers ? artificial intelligence ? Cars ? Is there someone somewhere discovering the ubiquitous usage of the next decades ? Does computer science still has the potential to bring the same kind of world-changing tools ? Here's something i'd like to ask AlanKay : at that time, you probably had the feeling that you we…

I am not he, but I may be able to offer some history/perspective. There was a real fear of computers back then, much like the fear of AI today. They worried that the 'big brain' would put people out of work and take over the world. Multiple movies were made where the computer was the antagonist, including the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first computer I ever touched was called a calculator and I've heard a coup…

Thank you for the historical info, and the video; as a big computing history buff, I really appreciate both the first-hand account and the media of the time!
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