Super smart kid, very nice to work with. I ended up supporting one of the systems he built (in Perl). I used his Cataylst Perl framework for some projects after that because of him.
Super smart kid, very nice to work with. I ended up supporting one of the systems he built (in Perl). I used his Cataylst Perl framework for some projects after that because of him.
>There wouldn't have been any downsides for them
Really? NO downsides???
- throwing away a decade and a half of work and engineering experience (Avie Tevanian helped write Mach, this is like having Linus being your chief of software development and saying "just switch to Hurd!")
- uncertain licensing (Apple still ships ancient bash 3.2 because of GPL)
- increased development time to a shipping, modern OS (it already took them 5 years to ship 10.0, and it was rough)
That's just off the top of my head. I believe you think there wouldn't have been any downsides because you didn't stop to think of any, or are ideaologically disposed to present the Linux kernel in 1996 as being better or safer than XNU.
Well, there’s a parallel universe! Beige boxes running BeOS late-90s-cool maybe, but would we still have had the same upending results for mobile phones, industrial design, world integration, streaming media services…
The keyboard is tactile, and I’ve long dreamed of augmenting Alexa by covering my house in purpose-specific buttons, but that seems like a short road. Even the most advanced HCI device I’ve ever seen proposed by a consumer company—Meta’s Orion wristbands that read hand movements by measuring the electrical signals in your wrist—aren’t tangible in the slightest.
What am I missing? Can any fellow futurists point me in the right direction? I don’t need “doable today” or even “the technology is worked out”, but ideally I’m looking for something more doable than tangible holograms. See https://xkcd.com/678/
EDIT; the VR suits from the Three Body Problem books come to mind, using tiny actuators and temperature controls (thermal actuators?) to simulate touch. I could see that in a glove for sure, and that’s probably the most futuristic tactility gets at this point, but I doubt it’ll ever see fully-body usage, both for technical feasibility and user convenience reasons. There’s a reason the TV show replaced them with brain-modulating headsets… I guess that’s really the end dream.
What is a tangible hologram (or any interface, really) other than an illusion, at the end of the day?
I think the vision is neat but hampered by the projector tech and the cost of setting up a version of your own, since it's so physically tied and Bret is (imo stubbornly) dedicated to the concept there's not a community building on this outside the local area that can make it to DL in person. It'd be neat to have a version for VR for example and maybe some day AR becomes ubiquitous enough to make it work anywhere.
[0] Annoyingly it's not open sourced so you can't really build your own version easily or examine it. There have been a few attempts at making similar systems but they haven't lasted as long or been as successful as Bret's Dynamicland.