Every once is a while a research project comes along that has the potential to totally shake up computing and what it even means to interact with a system. The project Dynamicland.org, is a result of [Bret Victor]’s research journey over the years, looking into various aspects of human computer interaction and what it even means to think like a human.
One of the overhead projectors tied to a realboxIn Realtalk, paper is your programming medium
Dynamicland is an instantiation of a Realtalk ecosystem, deployed into a whole building. Tables are used as computing surfaces, with physical objects such as pieces of paper, notebooks, anything which can be read by one of the overhead cameras, becoming the program listing, as well as the user interface. The camera is associated with a projector, with the actual hardware hooked into so-called ‘Realboxes’ which are Linux machines running the Realtalk software. Separate Realboxes (and other hardware such as a Raspberry Pi, running Realtalk) are all federated together using the Realtalk protocol, which allows communication from hardware in the ceiling, to any on the desk, and also to other desks and computing surfaces.
Realtalk itself is described as an environment for authoring and using computation media. The Realtalk system provides a language extension to Lua. Together these form a domain-specific language. Realtalk is also a kind of dynamicland makes whole building computer
