Dynamicland 2024
I assume this hasn't been "released" yet, but still thought I'd ask if the source code for the operating system (or "computing environment", in Dynamicland-speak) is available anywhere and also if there yet exists any DIY hardware guides for building your own to play with at my own location (far from the Oakland/Berkeley Dynamicland facility).
I believe the FAQ confirms that this is not possible at the moment:
> Where can I get Realtalk?
>> At present, Realtalk exists in Dynamicland spaces and in the spaces of our collaborators, where we can carefully grow and tend in-person communities of practice. In the short term, additional spaces will be started by people who have contributed significantly to an existing space and have internalized the culture and its values. Long term, we intend to distribute the ideas in the form of kits+games which will guide communities through building their own computing environments that they fully understand and control. Long long term, computing may be built into all infrastructure as electric light is today. This would also require an extensive network of educational support.
If you're looking for something like this that's under more active development, (and with available source code,) check out Folk [0]. It's being developed by some folks who visited/worked at Dynamicland but this is entirely in the open. They even have an open house in Brooklyn monthly where you can visit and check everything out!
I spent quite a lot of time at Dynamicland Oakland. It's great fun and the people are just wonderful. I think of Realtalk as adding another layer to programs, the Physical Layer. Program behavior can be determined and controlled by physical layout as well as code. It's not completely unlike a frontend/backend distinction, and in fact you could make a Realtalk simulator using a javascript canvas much more easily than building the camera/projector setup.
Just like building full stack software, there's a large amount of nonobvious skill in dictating your separations of concerns between the physical layer and software layer. Good programs are flexible, remixable, modular, intuitive, and let non-programmers make nontrivial interactions and enhancements via the physical layer. Bad programs require you to have the physical objects in a particular configuration, or break completely if one piece of paper is lost. I found these programming design questions a really interesting part of playing at Dynamicland.
A solid limitation of the system is that the pieces of programs aren't actually modular. You can't take a Cat from one program and a Dog from another program and have the dog interact with the cat. This is obvious in software - that's why we design APIs - but it's frustrating when all your programs exist in the same space (that's the whole selling point) and when bringing part of Program A into Program B is so intuitive and, when you have dozens of these programs lying around the room, inevitable.
I'd love to see them explore (wait for it...) using AI. Incorporating object recognition could remove the need for pasting dots onto every object by defining rules like "when you see a car, color it Red". It could allow for inter-program interoperability via the shared language of object recognition. And it could even determining logical interactions in a fun and surprising way: what _should_ happen when I take the cactus from this program and put it on top of the balloon from that program?
I love the ambitions and values in this work: that programs are physical so are shared and discoverable, that things are learnable through play, that the goal is people together.
It's as if you asked someone to redesign the computer (as a concept) based on the technology and knowledge we have now, and designed around the tasks most fundamentally human.
Always inspiring, always a gut check if I'm doing work that's valuable.
i'm always super impressed by brett victor and highly admire his work.
that said, I have to admit that it doesn't really feel "right" based on what I've seen. there's so many limitations to the physical world that a virtual space doesn't have. i get that physical objects can participate in the UI and that arranging things in 3D space is sometimes nicer than using a mouse/keyboard.
However, the fact that there is still code written on pieces of paper, and that the projector can only show a 2D image (which is only primitively interactable) just looks super awkward. and the question of "what can you do" when you're staring at a blank table seems tough
again, it's super cool research but i wonder if he has plans to resolve some of these fundamental issues with mixing real and virtual
For those unfamiliar, the founder is Bret Victor. He made a name for himself working on human interfaces at Apple in the Steve Jobs iPad era. In 2012, he gave a couple of influential talks: Inventing on Principle, and Stop Drawing Dead Fish.
Bret's take on being a visionary/futurist is fascinating. He imagines the near-future world he wants to live in, prototypes enough of it to write a talk about, and gives the talk with the hopes that someone in the audience will be inspired to make it a reality. He gives ideas away with the hope that he'll be paid back with a world where those ideas have been realized.
I think the cool part about this is that you can easily build a user interface from physical objects, so you can skip some of the digital frontend and design and focus more on the computational backend. This frees you up for more explorative, improvised coding, which is great for research and art but maybe also many other situations where fixed user interfaces get into the way too much. Based on what they show about their biology lab project, it seems to be surprisingly useful.
I watched the new intro video and I have no idea what this is other than lots and lots and lots of cards with dots on them. It looks soo complex!
I love the bookshelf interface. It is as good as a regular bookshelf for browsing and inspires me to explore.
However, I hit the back button as soon as I click a link, where with a physical bookshelf I would probably crack the book and flip through, no comparison there.
That Bret keeps Dynamicland and Realtalk so closed to others while touting it as “more open than open source” is really frustrating.
I get it. Opening it up means losing control. I really appreciate the desire to specifically not share it on traditionally engineer-centric spaces like GitHub as that will skew the vision towards engineering and possibly shut out non-programmers. I even get that Dynamicland isn’t really code that can be shared anyway.
But you have to give people something more than a general description and a vague invitation to visit your space. Otherwise it isn’t really open at all.
Some ideas:
- A document for how to experiment with domain exploration using tangibles and people in a way that leverages insights gleaned from Dynamicland
- A codebase for a “toy” computational system (named completely differently from Realtalk/Dynamicland so it’s clear that it is not actually part of Dynamicland) that shows how it’s possible to link physical properties to computational agents
whenever i'll teach newcomers computing, i will now adopt the approach laid out here. it's easy to forget how painful learning computing is, how much you need to know about the internet to make a single http request and read out it's response. user @simonw talked about this recently on twitter [0][1]
absolute beautiful point about needing a different kind of literacy in the modern age at the end of the video.
i wish, with all my heart, that this and similar projects develop a loving community which will enable other communities to learn computing in an accessible, cheap and memorable way.
[0] https://x.com/simonw/status/1829195655006531661 (original twitter link)
[1] https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01j6z4cj87f5ky3c6ese0thscw (backup because twitter is not the future of computing)
I think the overall idea here is really cool. But ... to me the idea of printing stanzas of code onto paper and then putting them on a board so they can be OCRed back into text and then re-parsed seems circuitous. Like as a demonstration that in principle you can work this way on code as well as on more spatially-native concepts, it seems fine, but is that actually the best way for all kinds of work? Or can we acknowledge that this makes more sense for some things than for others?
I wonder whether someone already has build away to create modular synthesizer using block with knobs on the table. A line on the top of the knob would signal its position. (In the video I saw some shots that looked like sequencers.) You would also need some mechanism to connect the modules together. I played around with VCV Rack [1], but adjusting knobs with a mouse feels very different than using your hands to turn a physical knob. Also, I would like to have more freedom in arranging modules more freely as you could do on a table, instead of using patch cables that go into all kinds of directions. Especially for newbies, it would be an interesting way to see if they want to go into real modular synths based on Eurorack [2], AE Modular [3] or microrack [4].
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurorack
This feels like something you could get a whole lot more traction and experimentation in quickly if it also existed as a room in something like VRChat or added to people's rooms in a VR passthrough mode. You'd lose some of the benefits of being in a shared physical space but you would also lose some of the limitations around the tracking resolution and stability of the fiducial markers on the page and open it up to people who can't make it to the location in person.
A 2.0 version could even merge the two versions slightly, tracking irl people into the virtual space (with pose and position estimates?) and programs (? I don't know the lingo off hand, but I mean the paper sheets everything revolves around) and in the opposite direction project the programs from VR onto the real table.
I've been interested in it for years so I'm very glad to see it's still moving forwards and alive. There were years where I couldn't find any actual new information coming out of the project.
I really like Bret’s talks and I think Dynamicland is a great experiment which I’m happy to see moving forward. However in this video he came off less as an engineer and designer and more of a preacher. He seemed to care more about convincing people that his politics and ideas are just so gosh darn great without talking about any specifics. (When I say “politics” I mean more like “the nature of reality and the role of humans”, not Red vs Blue.) I would really like to hear more about how Realtalk actually works. It seems like there are several glaring problems that Bret has either solved or is at least working on, but he doesn’t talk about the solutions much. (Indicator collision, portability of indicators between Dynamicland instances, and debugging are just a few off the top of my head.)
Pleasantly surprised to see a video with footnotes. Up until today, I'd only encountered this practice on A Capella Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc
The best thing about this website is that it was made in Dynamicland, which is the most bootstrapp-y & Dynamicland thing ever:
For those criticizing, think of this updated website more from the lens of art, less pragmatics. The Doug Engelbart "Mother of All Demos" functioned in this way as well. Can you imagine scoffing at Engelbart in the same way? There are quite a few deep ideas in this presentation of Dynamicland, many of which are subtle and take some effort to find and appreciate, much like art.
Yes, it is intended to be useful to many one day, and they claim it "actually works" _now_, but if you read carefully (and you should!), they are trying very hard to maintain (and gradually grow) a beautiful little flame of a vision. PARC, on the other hand, had 10 years. Afterwards, industry ran with the ideas they wanted, and Alan Kay has been beating the "you missed the big ideas!" drum since. The Dynamicland group is trying to learn from this lesson of history.
Kudos to the group.
As cool as Dynamicland is, I still don’t get why they won’t open source it or at least release it in some form.
I’ve heard various people give roundabout excuses, but none of them hold water. They often fall into one of the following categories:
- “People won’t get the core ideas and will use it to make things that go against the core ideas” — People who care about Bret Victor’s work will take the time to learn the ideas. People who don’t might try and make something Bret doesn’t like, but currently the world is full of things Bret doesn’t like, so I don’t get how that would be different than the status quo.
- “It’s actually ‘anti-internet’, reimagining computers as objects in physical space, without the intangible connections provided by the internet” — Cool! I’d like to use it to make an airgapped little lab thing for people in my city to play and experiment in, but I can’t do that unless it’s released to the community.
- “Yeah but remember it’s ‘anti-internet’, releasing it open source on the internet would violate the core principles.” — This feels too cute by half. I don’t consider this a legitimate objection.
- “Just come to Oakland, you’ll understand when you get here and use it.” — That’s way out of many people’s budgets. I also get the feeling that I wouldn’t come around just by seeing it, I think I’d want one in my city even more.
- “You’re not entitled to other people’s work.” — True, but most stuff done in this sort of research space is done with the intent of spreading an idea or increasing the public good. It seems kind of odd that the Dynamicland folks keep talking about what a revolutionary concept it is while preventing 99.9% of people from actually experiencing it.
Overall it just seems like such a weird attitude. I get that they’re worried about the world misunderstanding their ideas, but at this point there are tons of people who have been eating up Bret Victor’s work and have immense respect for his ideas, and would gladly watch, listen to or read whatever instructions would be necessary to help someone who’s already bought in “play by the rules” and get the best possible experience.
Can someone who has six minutes to watch the intro give those of us who don't a TL;DW?
One of the most striking things about this for me is how clearly it demonstrates the fact that community and sharing are not the same thing.
Building tools that enable communities to share effectively seems like another additional challenge, and the fact that virtual spaces and digital spaces are dismissed seems like it might prove a major roadblock to connecting and sharing in a larger inclusive community.
Given the interest in leveraging this for doing science it also seems that this is at risk for empowering individual labs while leaving all interfaces to the rest of the larger scientific community dependent on the current utterly broken system of publication.
Very cool. I do believe physical embodiment of computers is the future and the current screen/GUI paradigm will decline, but the embodiment will be different. The physically embodied computer of the future will be a humanoid robot, and we will interact with it the same way we do with humans: by gesturing and speaking. There will always be a place for screens, just as there is still a place for books, but we will have less reason to use them when we can accomplish what we want to do in more natural collaboration with physically embodied computers in the form of humanoid robots, alongside other humans.
While Dynamicland/Realtalk and its ethos have tended to strike me as... pretentious, to say the least, the 2024 video has a key quote that really resonates with how I've been thinking about software lately:
"Anything you can make an interpreter for is a program."
Thinking of data not as something to be processed by code, but as code in and of itself, is one of those mindsets that pops up independently in various circles, but a lot of mainstream programming styles and tools and techniques seem to be borderline antithetical to that sort of mindset. I think the recent renaissance-of-sorts of AI might help contribute to making code/data equivalence more mainstream, since that seems to be how your average AI model operates: as a bunch of neurons that encode code and data as a single blob. Unfortunately, that "blob" tends to be opaque and inscrutable; I wouldn't be surprised if the next big leap in software engineering coincides with bringing data-as-code-friendly programming environments into the mainstream, such that said inscrutable blobs could be made, well, scrutable.
This is a pretty neat idea. Watched through a few talks. I love cyberphysical programming, live programming, involving the audience in the computation, so Bret's work with Dynamicland speaks to me. I do however think the card system could use a rethink in terms of ergonomics.
Wish I still lived in California so I could check out the system in person! Watching the development of this project with keen interest... sure, a lot of the ideas might not end up catching on, but that's the nature of research.
Victor's previous work has all been huge inspirations to me, but after many years of this project that I initially was hyped for there are just some big red flags to me that this isn't the way forward really or even a good use of his talent.
Big talk about solving the worlds problems out in the room and not on the phone I agree with in sentiment but I feel all that big talk falls completely flat on it's face when the project you're pouring money and most importantly time only exists in one space and only benefits a small group of academics and then that issue being gushed over as if its a benefit when really it just means you're not actually building in the real world at all you're building a fake thing in a fake world for the 0.01% of people to larp with.
Think the world of computing could greatly benefit from Brett but almost in his success it means he'll just be able to play pretend in the world of "non-profit"/academia meaning the output will be citations + grants not value and there will be no real benefit to computing from that work.
Maybe I'd feel different if the intro video ended with a repo and a list of hardware to build your own Dynamicland, I almost think the fact it doesn't is a tactic for the project to never have to really prove its value...
Kudos to Bret and all the best to the communal computing community (pun intended) hopefully this takes the cyber physical system including IoT and machine-to-machine to another (useful) level.
>Anyone can change any program at any time, and see the changes immediately
Not sure what programming language Bret implementing the system but recently there's discussion how difficult and how slow to parse/compile some of the popular programming languages including C++ and Rust. In this case D is a unique anomaly where it has immediate rdmd REPL facility although it's a complex and a compiled language [1].
For creative, inventive, intuitive and comprehensive programming cyber physical system that involve hardware with fast sensing, control and immediate responses, D language is hands down the best programming there is [2]. The D authors however don't believe in any killer applications but this Dynamicland of communal computing most probably the niche that D is looking for to propel it for more wider adoption.
[1] Parsing Awk Is Tricky:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41422283
[2] D Features Overview:
The intro video looks very cool! I would love to try it but I doubt that'll be possible.
I have the physical 2017 zine and it's a beauty to have a giant folded sheet of poster paper you can expand and read on a table, like a newspaper
Have they open sourced any of it?
I'm building my own implementation to understand how this works.
No idea what I'm doing yet. Let's build together!
I'm livestreaming here: https://youtube.com/live/02-wJ7Od9Bo?feature=share
(Warning: I have yet to shower today).
Alright someone has to be the skeptic: there's no fucking god damned way this works as well as the video suggests. There has to be enormous amounts of behind-the-scenes work to support this thing; the idea that it's self-hosting all in one room is an absolutely extraordinary claim. It's a big red flag that they only invite specific people who are good "culture fits", and don't have any public code. They can't risk people seeing the puppet wires.
It's some Wizard of Oz / Potemkin village / confidence trick. That's why nothing has been released after a decade -- there's nothing to release. It's vapor, this generation's Xanadu.
This seems to me like the apotheosis of Jef Raskin's Humane Interface - super cool!
I'm hopeful VR programming with standardized programming languages and AI will create a Dynamicland-like software environment one day. Social spatial programming just needs to be made fun like building in a game.
Great to see this project continuing to progress!
I was fortunate enough to visit back in 2018. It’s so nice to see this persevere.
what an important set of ideas. if I'm interpreting correctly it's an instance of a pattern language for organizing people aided by tech. the idea seems to have moved past the constraints of goal oriented methodologies and on to modular blocks of logic for coordination.
i wonder if a coarse analogy for it might include roberts rules in a related category of ideas, and then with some concepts from tech around versioning and then it's something else entirely, but they seem to approach some of the same coordination problems.
I used to think Bret Victor's work is cool but how exactly do we build all these seemingly ad-hoc interactions into systems? one-by-one? Maybe generative code AI can do it on-demand one day?
This would make so much sense on a interactive whiteboards and class rooms. Teachers could print new class material they find on the internet
Is there a list of the books at the bottom given somewhere? The resolution is low and some books are too thin to see clearly
I didn't want to watch videos while at work so had to do it with the text, and trying to figure out what it was was hard. First thing I encountered a few times was this sentence:
"An independent nonprofit research lab, whose mission is to enable universal literacy in a humane dynamic medium."
That said literally NOTHING about what this project is.
Only later on I found this text:
"The entire website is made in Realtalk, which means that everything on it physically exists. (Even this sentence.) It’s not a rendering of a virtual space — it’s a real place."
And FINALLY I sort of understood what the interesting thing here is!
This has gone a long way from the first demos, but in a way it kind of fell back to a fairly standard model of computing: ie this looks like a reactive visual programming environment with a real-world user interface sitting on top of it.
Looking at the demos, the real world objects look mostly like standard user input on a computer (knobs, buttons, textarea, pointers, etc.) - using actually 3d printed models of houses in a wind simulation is fun, but would you print another house for each iteration of the design? what's the point here? - and the papers laid out really are Observable cells.
This aimed to be some kind of paradigm change, but it just ends up being Excel-on-a-table.
Being a fan of Excel/Observable myself, I see it as something great though, just not ground-breaking.
Unable to navigate this website since I have a disability that requires keyboard focus.
I had always been curious as to what his thoughts were on generative AI, but he stopped posting a while back. Now, you can find his thoughts in the Dynamicland FAQ. tl;dr - he's not a fan. https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/ https://dynamicland.org/archive/2017/Is_this_the_civilizatio... https://worrydream.com/quotes/?search=kerosene
Wow I really like my keyboard
Inspiring stuff. TLDR, AFAICT, no, you can not do this on your own without participating IRL and taking away what you learned. Am inspired that it keeps growing, am disappointed that an indoctrination of a sorts is the only (apparent) route in. That said, sign me up please.
I hate that website design. It doesn't answer the basic question: WTF is "dynamicland"?
Home page has been updated as well, though I am unable to submit that as I have previously submitted the same URL when the site launched back in 2017.
I had the good fortune of taking a field trip there in 2018.
The video is a very good overview of the project.
One interesting artifact of "the real world simulates itself" is version control. At Dynamicland, each version of a program is a sheet of paper (with a unique set of fiducials along the edges). If you want to edit a program, you grab a keyboard and point it at the program. A text editor comes up; you make your changes, and hit commit. When you do, it spits out a new piece of paper with your changes. Put it in the view of the camera to use the new version. Take it away and use the old paper to roll the change back.