61–70 of 87 posts
And if you're going to talk about ideas and inspiration: Lighttable does nothing that emacs didn't do 20 years ago except a little prettier.
Let say you're doing some medical research, growing some cell cultures and you add some compounds to the cell cultures to see what happens. Then something weird happened to some of the cell cultures, and you don't know exactly what caused it. Perhaps that thing was really an important scientific discovery waiting to happen, but you missed it, because you didn't have all the data.
The process is normally recorded with a lab diary, where you write down everything deemed important. The problem is, you're not going to notice everything, and there is also a lot of things that you can't see without more sensors that just your eyes.
The system Bret describes here is basically an automated lab diary. With enough sensors it could record much more data, much more accurately than a person, and it has a way to query the actual data rather than having to either manually browse through pages of text or searching through it with just a basic full-text search engine.
A problem with many scientific experiments is that you might a lot of measuring equipment and sensors for the thing you are doing an experiment on, but you don't have the same thing for the experiment itself, to easily be able to debug the process and to see where something went right or wrong. Why was one lab able to reproduce an experiment, but another couldn't? This kind of questions can be very difficult and time consuming to answer.
My experience with years of embedded programming is that NO HUMAN BEING is made for working with the cold, brainless machine or metal if you don't visualize your data.
Even the person who tells you she likes doing it, she can't work on it for long periods of time without burning.
It is like climbing over 7.000meters of altitude. Humans could survive for some time with those conditions, but depleting internal resources fast.
I love Bret Victor's talks, blog posts, etc. They're super inspiring. 2 things came to mind though. 1. It seems, possibly, the exact wrong time to make rooms with giant displays. With things like Google Glass and Oculus Rift as first gen (2nd?) VR/AR you could project all of that info virtually and cheaply and be able to have all the visualization he describes wherever you are, not just at a makerspace that only a fe…
I think display are, for now, the better option. AR and VR are still far too in their infancy for them to be as intuitively useful as a room full of displays is to NASA or a power grid operations team(per his example). That will change with time of course, but for something we can do now and over the next few years I think displays and projectors are the way to go. In a way, the projectors over the worktable he shows…
Assuming it's 5 years (probably over estimating) where will fb oculus be? If it happens to have become fb oculus glass, something you wear that can augment the world this system of Bret's will come to fruition just as there displays are no longer needed
I guess that's irrelevant though as switching displays will be trivial. The real work is in the software
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But maybe our intuition is wrong here: "Hundhausen and colleagues found that how the visualizations were used matters a lot. For example, using visualizations in lecture demonstration had little impact on student learning. But having students build their own visualizations had significant impact on those students’ learning." p.118 Oram, Andrew, and Greg Wilson. 2011. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Bel…
The Pharo guys are working on that: https://vimeo.com/channels/ndc2014/97315968 Starts slow, but gets really interesting (disclaimer: I'm a biased interaction designer in this regard, I love this stuff) halfway in. Pharo might actually become a very good fit for Victor's idea of a big-screen "seeing room" debugging environment, now that I think of it - combine it with some of Victor's idea of drawing dynamic visualis…
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he got out of it (salary ... This is an argument I've heard many employers use that is factually incorrect. Every month, employees freely give their time to a company. The company is in debt to the employee. At the end of that month there is a financial reckoning and the debt is repaid. The moment the employee comes to work the following day the company is debt to the employee again. I cannot stress this enough - for…
Not necessarily; that depends on one's particular arrangements. I, for example, get paid approximately mid-month, so I start out indebted to the company each month and the balance gradually shifts over time.
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The Pharo guys are working on that: https://vimeo.com/channels/ndc2014/97315968 Starts slow, but gets really interesting (disclaimer: I'm a biased interaction designer in this regard, I love this stuff) halfway in. Pharo might actually become a very good fit for Victor's idea of a big-screen "seeing room" debugging environment, now that I think of it - combine it with some of Victor's idea of drawing dynamic visualis…
Does Pharo support anything more than the standard hot code swapping and live object (but not code) manipulation?
In other words... a meatspace debugger? Cool idea, but I don't quite buy the comparison to "spaces laden with sensors and visualizations" like the NASA control center, Large Hadron Collider, etc.. All of those spaces revolve around monitoring, not the design/making process. In a similar vein, in my field of computational science, heaps of money has been invested in spaces for data exploration/visualization [1], unfor…
It's not only monitoring because it's not passive, they interact with the system and make changes on the fly, so it's making in a sense too.
I love Bret Victor's talks, blog posts, etc. They're super inspiring. 2 things came to mind though. 1. It seems, possibly, the exact wrong time to make rooms with giant displays. With things like Google Glass and Oculus Rift as first gen (2nd?) VR/AR you could project all of that info virtually and cheaply and be able to have all the visualization he describes wherever you are, not just at a makerspace that only a fe…
The second is with full VR goggles. Right now there's not a really good way to be able to use them and interact with anything outside the VR environment.
For your other point about the graph the system doesn't have to pick out the best on its own. Just having the possible values and the results displayed the user could pick which one achieves their goals best. For his light following robot though there's a pretty easy way to evaluate the parameters, how far is the robot from the light, that is a simple function and could easily be programmed.
The integration of the whole room and how you get the robot to automatically do many runs with different parameters, for the viewing across possibilities, is where I think a lot of the difficulty lies. To do that with a small robot you have to have a lot of things automated: robot repositioning, light movement, data collection on the robot, etc.
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Huh...? He worked for a company out of his own will, and that company paid him in exchange for his work, with the full understanding that all ownership of the work would go to them. I mean, it's not even as if Apple hides that about them- that's one thing they tell you OVER and OVER when you interview with them. He knew exactly what he was getting into when he accepted to work for them (and did so for many years), an…
he got out of it (salary ... This is an argument I've heard many employers use that is factually incorrect. Every month, employees freely give their time to a company. The company is in debt to the employee. At the end of that month there is a financial reckoning and the debt is repaid. The moment the employee comes to work the following day the company is debt to the employee again. I cannot stress this enough - for…