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"We have Dynamicland at home"

About Bret Victor's Worst Nightmare


This project is an attempt to recreate some of the cool communal-computing aspects of Dynamicland using consumer AR devices.

As the name implies, this is firmly against Dynamicland's vision of bringing computing into the real world and allowing people to interact with computers and each other at the same time without barriers. But I don't have Dynamicland. I have an iPhone. So I am building my own version of Dynamicland using that.

I am personally not super interested in the programming aspects of Dynamicland right now. Instead I am focusing on a particular experience that I want for myself and my robotics students. Specifically I want to be able to:

  1. Pull a sticky note with a tracking code out of my notebook and put it on a wall or table.
  2. Point my phone at it to see AR content in my physical space.
  3. Interact with it using my phone as a "cursor" reaching out into the AR space.
  4. Put the code back into my notebook for safekeeping.

Conceptually, the idea is to have little apps that live inside the tracking codes. They should be fully multiplayer and grounded in physical space. I want any number of participants to be able to interact with the apps equally, and to have a consistent view of the space.

Overall, I want to truly augment our physical spaces. I don't want it to feel like a mere overlay, I want it to feel like an extension of the world we live in.

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Added rotation to objects, finally, so now I can actually use the third dimension properly. &ar

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My final demo video for my AR jam project, inspired by Dynamicland. This system allows you to build apps that are a natural part of your physical space, anchored to real physical objects. The apps can be stored inside QR codes and can be copied from tag to tag for easy collaboration.

The apps are collaborative by nature, and the physical tracking codes allow anyone to participate and collaborate. My hope is to extend this system and use it with my robotics students this year. &ar

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The greatest AR app you’ve ever seen. &ar

(The actually interesting part begins now.)

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Finally! I have a little Lua app running on a server, rendering scene data which is sent to my phone over websockets, which is then being tracked to this tag. Should be able to build out actual AR tic-tac-toe now. &ar

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A bit of a detour from the fun &AR stuff into making the server that will actually run these little AR apps...I have spent far too long wrangling Lua but it is working.

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yay, I got it displaying &AR content attached to an AprilTag 😃

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My jam project is an &AR workspace inspired by Dynamicland, where you can interact with little apps attached to tracking codes. Before the jam I got as far as running an AR sample app on iOS, and tracking AprilTags within an AR session. My goal now is to attach AR objects to those tags.

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