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?
Folk Computer
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Re: Folk Computer
#12This was also mentioned recently in a good discussion on another post on the author's blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412
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.
Re: Folk Computer
#13Just 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
Re: Folk Computer
#14Site seems dead.
edit 1h later: loaded now, dont know what im looking at
Re: Folk Computer
#15Both seem to have worked at/with Dynamicland previously, though not mentioned on this site. https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/ https://cwervo.com/projects/dynamicland-experiments/
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?
It's astonishing (and sad) how few opportunities exist for basic research.
Re: Folk Computer
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Headsets are in many ways a less cool version of our own eyes.
Also, this would be helpful for the sightless.
Re: Folk Computer
#17Just 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…
+1 to this, I was also there and it was lots of fun
Re: Folk Computer
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
It's astonishing (and sad) how few opportunities exist for basic research.
Donald Braben's book touches on what's changed pretty well I felt (published by Stripe press too): https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donal...
Re: Folk Computer
#19I 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.
Re: Folk Computer
#20This 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.