7 ms·

Folk Computer

165 points by schmudde 3y ago

jstanley 3y ago
What is this?
- reanimus 3y ago
  https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots This page gives more explanation than the landing page does I think
- stereolambda 3y ago
  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!
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Tangible Computing :D
    - __loam 3y ago
      Someone get Tim on the line to look into this.
  - atrus 3y ago
    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
    - staplers 3y ago
      Headsets are in many ways a less cool version of our own eyes. Also, this would be helpful for the sightless.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Exactly, websites like this need straplines and a clear "about" page. >"This {convoluted previous story about an audience generated concert that uses computer vision} is basically the idea behind Folk Computer, a small human-computer-interaction (HCI) research project run out of a converted auto shop in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that I visited one afternoon in March. Its founders, Omar Rizwan and Andrés Cuervo, want to make an interface that is haptic and three-dimensional: no longer an image of a desktop, but a real one. Folk’s hardware consists of a tiny, monitor-less Intel computer, a ceiling-mounted camera, a projector, a printer, and lots of paper spread out on an IKEA table. Each sheet is printed with a QR-code-like marker (called an AprilTag) that corresponds to a program written on a laptop and stored on the Github cloud. The camera reads the tag and executes its instructions, which, for now, are fairly simple – “draw a green box,” for example, causes the projector to cast four green lines onto the table. Folk is part of a larger “screenless” trend in HCI, ..." (Spike Magazine, https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-emily-dickinson-apple-computer-house https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-emily-dickinson-...) I guessed that following the "in the media" link would lead to a story with a brief synopsis, but the link just goes to a blogroll that's no longer got the "Folk computer" story on, searching for it gets one the above page though.
netghost 3y ago
The button is pretty amusing, but The rest of the site does a better job of motivating it. I've taught a few kids a little bit of programming with things like scratch, but I think this would be infinitely more fun. I could imagine a group of kids who don't think programming is for them having a blast with something like this.
ryanwhitney 3y ago
Both seem to have worked at/with Dynamicland previously, though not mentioned on this site. https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/ https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/ https://cwervo.com/projects/dynamicland-experiments/ https://cwervo.com/projects/dynamicland-experiments/
- joshmarinacci 3y ago
  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?
  - schmudde 3y ago
    It's astonishing (and sad) how few opportunities exist for basic research.
    - skadamat 3y ago
      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-Donald-Braben/dp/0578675919 https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donal...
      - schmudde 3y ago
        Ah nice tip. Will put it on the reading list!
  - shon 3y ago
    PARC, though awesome for society, was a massive commercial failure for Xerox. As tech nerd, I love the lore of The PARC and went to visit it as soon as I moved to the Bay Area. However, I assume it would be taught as a lesson of what not to do in a business context: Investing in pure research often yields innovations that are opposed to existing business lines or simply too far out to see as useful by management. That said, many companies have research arms. Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Meta, Google…
lloydatkinson 3y ago
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?
- Liftyee 3y ago
  Agree that the first page is not very helpful. I found this "longform" to be better: https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots#towards-a-folk-computer https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots#towards-a-folk-comput...
aeontech 3y ago
This was also mentioned recently in a good discussion on another post on the author's blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412 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.
csmeyer 3y ago
Just 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
- skadamat 3y ago
  +1 to this, I was also there and it was lots of fun
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  So does the primary use case of this seem to be for teaching computational ideas in a simple manner?
KomoD 3y ago
Site seems dead. edit 1h later: loaded now, dont know what im looking at
Joeboy 3y ago
I 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.
lsy 3y ago
This 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.
- amatecha 3y ago
  Yeah, I was pretty excited at first, hoping someone is showing their forward-looking human-friendly computer, encompassing all of the best principles of permacomputing and frugal computing... Was not expecting some kind of "real-world computing" platform. It's definitely interesting, but not at all what I expected based on the name.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  The Commodore VIC-20 was marketed as VC-20 in Germany and got backronym-d as "Volkscomputer": https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/VIC-20 https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/VIC-20
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  If you want a folk computer, it needs to read standard file types, have a little attack surface as possible, run off batteries charged by its environment, and otherwise be similar to a phone with half-a-dozen very spacious NVME drives packed in.
orangesite 3y ago
Yeah, another universe where you have wizards who know how to fold the paper correctly to make the ambient computational environment do things. Hard pass. Folk computing for me is a hardware/software layer stripped off the commercial abstractions that hide the inherent simplicity of the medium.
- ripley12 3y ago
  > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    I thought it was a pithy comment that quickly indicated that, like emacs or vi versus pico or nano versus notepad, that this seems like a system that would segment people into lusers, users, and powerusers even harder than modern computing interfaces.
FergusArgyll 3y ago
This is pretty cool once I figured out what it is (~10 minutes)
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
This would be cool with a "swarm" of "cold-tech" displays. Like, a bunch of small e-ink displays. Feels like something like elixir/erlang vm would do great with.
AlphaWeaver 3y ago
This is so refreshing! As sibling commenter [0] mentions, this is clearly inspired by Dynamicland, and even uses the "Claim/When" syntax that Dynamicland uses to implement their "Realtalk" operating system. When Omar's post about Dynamicland [1] hit the front page last month, I was frustrated by how little information was available about the project. It seems that the folks behind Dynamicland were very against sharing anything online [2] due to concerns about "including everybody". On the one hand, I admire their vision. But on the other hand, it doesn't feel obvious to me that holding back something like Dynamicland would help it ultimately become "available everywhere." Even their answer of "come visit us in person" isn't relevant anymore since their physical space is closed. I'm very excited about this approach - even if it isn't open source, they've shared far more information about the way the system works. I'm sure this will inspire others and ultimately blossom into something much greater. Edit: actually, it's open source here: https://git.folk.computer/folk https://git.folk.computer/folk [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39242467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39242467 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412 [2]: https://gist.github.com/shaunlebron/4b9a9a986fca1e7abd0bfcadbedaa526 https://gist.github.com/shaunlebron/4b9a9a986fca1e7abd0bfcad...
- infinite8s 3y ago
  Bret does plan on publishing everything soon - https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526
infinite8s 3y ago
It's a bit unfortunate that people can't look past the projections and the dot frames/QR codes. Those are just a means to an end, which is trying to simulate a world where all objects have the ability to compute and can be easily reprogrammed on the fly. Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap they can be embedded in everything. Folk (and DynamicLand which inspired it) seems to be a peek into what living in that world could be like. Bret plans on publishing all their experiments this Spring - https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526. I for one cannot wait.

Folk Computer

165 points by schmudde 3y ago

jstanley 3y ago

What is this?

reanimus 3y ago
https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots This page gives more explanation than the landing page does I think
stereolambda 3y ago
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!
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Tangible Computing :D
  - __loam 3y ago
    Someone get Tim on the line to look into this.
- atrus 3y ago
  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
  - staplers 3y ago
    Headsets are in many ways a less cool version of our own eyes. Also, this would be helpful for the sightless.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Exactly, websites like this need straplines and a clear "about" page. >"This {convoluted previous story about an audience generated concert that uses computer vision} is basically the idea behind Folk Computer, a small human-computer-interaction (HCI) research project run out of a converted auto shop in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that I visited one afternoon in March. Its founders, Omar Rizwan and Andrés Cuervo, want to make an interface that is haptic and three-dimensional: no longer an image of a desktop, but a real one. Folk’s hardware consists of a tiny, monitor-less Intel computer, a ceiling-mounted camera, a projector, a printer, and lots of paper spread out on an IKEA table. Each sheet is printed with a QR-code-like marker (called an AprilTag) that corresponds to a program written on a laptop and stored on the Github cloud. The camera reads the tag and executes its instructions, which, for now, are fairly simple – “draw a green box,” for example, causes the projector to cast four green lines onto the table. Folk is part of a larger “screenless” trend in HCI, ..." (Spike Magazine, https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-emily-dickinson-apple-computer-house https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/essay-emily-dickinson-...) I guessed that following the "in the media" link would lead to a story with a brief synopsis, but the link just goes to a blogroll that's no longer got the "Folk computer" story on, searching for it gets one the above page though.

netghost 3y ago

The button is pretty amusing, but The rest of the site does a better job of motivating it. I've taught a few kids a little bit of programming with things like scratch, but I think this would be infinitely more fun. I could imagine a group of kids who don't think programming is for them having a blast with something like this.

ryanwhitney 3y ago

Both seem to have worked at/with Dynamicland previously, though not mentioned on this site. https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/ https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/ https://cwervo.com/projects/dynamicland-experiments/ https://cwervo.com/projects/dynamicland-experiments/

joshmarinacci 3y ago
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?
- schmudde 3y ago
  It's astonishing (and sad) how few opportunities exist for basic research.
  - skadamat 3y ago
    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-Donald-Braben/dp/0578675919 https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-Civilization-Donal...
    - schmudde 3y ago
      Ah nice tip. Will put it on the reading list!
- shon 3y ago
  PARC, though awesome for society, was a massive commercial failure for Xerox. As tech nerd, I love the lore of The PARC and went to visit it as soon as I moved to the Bay Area. However, I assume it would be taught as a lesson of what not to do in a business context: Investing in pure research often yields innovations that are opposed to existing business lines or simply too far out to see as useful by management. That said, many companies have research arms. Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Meta, Google…

lloydatkinson 3y ago

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?

Liftyee 3y ago
Agree that the first page is not very helpful. I found this "longform" to be better: https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots#towards-a-folk-computer https://folk.computer/notes/tableshots#towards-a-folk-comput...

aeontech 3y ago

This was also mentioned recently in a good discussion on another post on the author's blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412 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.

csmeyer 3y ago

Just 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

skadamat 3y ago
+1 to this, I was also there and it was lots of fun
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
So does the primary use case of this seem to be for teaching computational ideas in a simple manner?

KomoD 3y ago

Site seems dead. edit 1h later: loaded now, dont know what im looking at

Joeboy 3y ago

I 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.

lsy 3y ago

This 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.

amatecha 3y ago
Yeah, I was pretty excited at first, hoping someone is showing their forward-looking human-friendly computer, encompassing all of the best principles of permacomputing and frugal computing... Was not expecting some kind of "real-world computing" platform. It's definitely interesting, but not at all what I expected based on the name.
rzzzt 3y ago
The Commodore VIC-20 was marketed as VC-20 in Germany and got backronym-d as "Volkscomputer": https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/VIC-20 https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/VIC-20
RecycledEle 3y ago
If you want a folk computer, it needs to read standard file types, have a little attack surface as possible, run off batteries charged by its environment, and otherwise be similar to a phone with half-a-dozen very spacious NVME drives packed in.

orangesite 3y ago

Yeah, another universe where you have wizards who know how to fold the paper correctly to make the ambient computational environment do things. Hard pass. Folk computing for me is a hardware/software layer stripped off the commercial abstractions that hide the inherent simplicity of the medium.

ripley12 3y ago
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I thought it was a pithy comment that quickly indicated that, like emacs or vi versus pico or nano versus notepad, that this seems like a system that would segment people into lusers, users, and powerusers even harder than modern computing interfaces.

FergusArgyll 3y ago

This is pretty cool once I figured out what it is (~10 minutes)

pyinstallwoes 3y ago

This would be cool with a "swarm" of "cold-tech" displays. Like, a bunch of small e-ink displays. Feels like something like elixir/erlang vm would do great with.

AlphaWeaver 3y ago

This is so refreshing! As sibling commenter [0] mentions, this is clearly inspired by Dynamicland, and even uses the "Claim/When" syntax that Dynamicland uses to implement their "Realtalk" operating system. When Omar's post about Dynamicland [1] hit the front page last month, I was frustrated by how little information was available about the project. It seems that the folks behind Dynamicland were very against sharing anything online [2] due to concerns about "including everybody". On the one hand, I admire their vision. But on the other hand, it doesn't feel obvious to me that holding back something like Dynamicland would help it ultimately become "available everywhere." Even their answer of "come visit us in person" isn't relevant anymore since their physical space is closed. I'm very excited about this approach - even if it isn't open source, they've shared far more information about the way the system works. I'm sure this will inspire others and ultimately blossom into something much greater. Edit: actually, it's open source here: https://git.folk.computer/folk https://git.folk.computer/folk [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39242467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39242467 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412 [2]: https://gist.github.com/shaunlebron/4b9a9a986fca1e7abd0bfcadbedaa526 https://gist.github.com/shaunlebron/4b9a9a986fca1e7abd0bfcad...

infinite8s 3y ago
Bret does plan on publishing everything soon - https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526

infinite8s 3y ago

It's a bit unfortunate that people can't look past the projections and the dot frames/QR codes. Those are just a means to an end, which is trying to simulate a world where all objects have the ability to compute and can be easily reprogrammed on the fly. Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap they can be embedded in everything. Folk (and DynamicLand which inspired it) seems to be a peek into what living in that world could be like. Bret plans on publishing all their experiments this Spring - https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526 https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526. I for one cannot wait.