[HN Gopher] The Alternate Reality Kit (1987) [video]
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The Alternate Reality Kit (1987) [video]
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 64 points
Date : 2024-06-24 00:58 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| lcuff wrote:
| When I hear Alan Kay talk dismissively about current applications
| and interfaces, and the lack of attention given to what was
| developed at PARC 40 or 50 years ago, I often wish he was more
| explicit about WHAT was developed. (I have watched the mother of
| all demos, which is truly awesome, but partial information). This
| video is another significant chunk, and it puts modern interfaces
| to shame for their lack of power and imagination. The depth of
| power here is analogous to the power of Lispy languages, where,
| until you really understand the concepts, you are ignorant as to
| how (for example) C++ is in no way "Object Oriented" in the way
| Alan Kay meant it, how impoverished it is, and how critical late
| binding is.
| jasonhong wrote:
| You might be interested in Brad Myers' new book "Pick, Click,
| Flick! The Story of Interaction Techniques". He's a prominent
| researcher in HCI at Carnegie Mellon University (and one of my
| colleagues). It gives a great overview of the history of how we
| interact with computers.
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/ixtbook/
|
| Here's a summary of the book: This book provides a
| comprehensive study of the many ways to interact with computers
| and computerized devices. An "interaction technique" starts
| when the user performs an action that causes an electronic
| device to respond, and includes the direct feedback from the
| device to the user. Examples include physical buttons and
| switches, on-screen menus and scrollbars operated by a mouse,
| touchscreen widgets and gestures such as flick-to-scroll, text
| entry on computers and touchscreens, consumer electronic
| controls such as remote controls, game controllers, input for
| virtual reality systems like waving a Nintendo Wii wand or your
| hands in front of a Microsoft Kinect, interactions with
| conversational agents such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant,
| Amazon Alexa or Microsoft Cortana, and adaptations of all of
| these for people with disabilities. The book starts with a
| history of the invention and development of these techniques,
| discusses the various options used today, and continues on to
| the future with the latest research on interaction techniques
| such as presented at academic conferences. It features
| summaries of interviews with the original inventors of some
| interaction techniques such as Larry Tesler (copy-and-paste),
| David Canfield Smith (the desktop and icons), Dan Bricklin
| (spreadsheets), Loren Brichter (Pull-to-Refresh), Bill Atkinson
| (Menu Bar and HyperCard), Ted Selker (IBM TrackPoint pointing
| stick), and many others. Sections also cover how to use, model,
| implement, and evaluate new interaction techniques. The goal of
| the book is to be useful for anyone interested in why we
| interact with electronic devices the way we do, to designers
| creating the interaction techniques of tomorrow who need to
| know the options and constraints and what has been tried, and
| even for implementers and consumers who want to get the most
| out of their interaction techniques.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I'm not sure how this puts things now to shame. Yes it's very
| playful and neat, but it's wildly impractical. It doesn't
| really "do" anything by itself. Instead you've to build up all
| interactions, most of which are physical, and know how to do
| so. And what's the result? Some spring interactions and markers
| on a bitmap?
|
| Compare this to how the web or apps are used today. They're
| task/purpose driven, and all of the UX has already been thought
| out. It's a far more simple and straightforward approach to
| build the functionality you want which you refine over time
| than to give a blank canvas that does everything and nothing
| and tell people to go figure it out themselves.
|
| It seems to me this is really just wanting to take the
| underpinnings of small talk and turn it into a physical UI
| representation. That's fun... but now what? I'm zero percent
| surprised this hasn't lasted.
| redorb wrote:
| Reminds me of this one [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_lxBwvf3Vk
|
| I remember when I saw it I wanted to play with it - just seemed
| like a good way to organize things and 'play' with your desktop
| quantum_state wrote:
| Thought it was an alternative fact kit LOL ...
| tanepiper wrote:
| There is some nice concepts in here that you can see in some
| things (like Unreal Blueprints) but the problem it has was you
| had to use a button for everything, and it just seems a bit
| clunky.
|
| I would love to see something like this for the web, there's
| never really been a tool that captures it as close as Yahoo Pipes
| did.
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