It is remarkable to me that someone who seems to be such a fan and student of Alan Kay does not make use of dynamic media to share their new and original ideas.

With PDFs and videos, the person receiving the message must attempt to recreate a model of the idea in their own head, and cannot interrogate the message itself with any questions.

On the other hand, when you give the person to whom you are communicating an executable simulation of your idea, they can play with it, modify it, run it with different initial conditions, see how it responds in different situations, and thereby acquire a more complete, experiential, and intuitive understanding of the idea you are attempting to communicate.

The more complex and dynamic the idea is, the greater the benefit of using dynamic media.

I cannot fathom why Victor publishes PDFs and videos instead of code.

@Personal Dynamic Media I’d say there are mainly two reasons.

First, it’s pretty hard to create an interactive simulation of your idea. Sometimes, text is just more effective. Often, a simulation can be underwhelming whereas the reader’s imagination might conceive something grander.

Second, Bret doesn’t consider himself finished and fears that if he releases just about any part of the actual technical solution, that will become “set in stone”. Let’s be honest, most programmers today aren’t used to modifying third-party artefacts. They rather take it as given, and work-around what they dislike about them. This is exactly what happened to e.g. Smalltalks (as Alan Kay points out, he was disappointed that ST stopped changing after they “released” it).

(of course, it’s somewhat ironic that the PDF talks about openness of models, knowledge, programs, etc., but Dynamicland is far from open; maybe they fear that a reduced version of Dynamicland might be more economically/socially stable, in which case, I fear if Dynamicland becomes widespread at all, these romantic intentions of Bret’s will still be appreciated only by few)

I don't think they've ever turned anyone away from visiting DynamicLand

Yeah, it more seems to be wanting to get away from some of the weirdness characteristic of online interaciton.

Well, visiting Dynamicland can get quite expensive for some people (talking about >700 dollars just for the flight). I understand their reasons (both philosophical and pragmatic), but still it's a little disappointing.

That's fair, but I think the idea is you can't really understand DynamicLand just from the code/software alone, since it's trying to simulate computation everywhere. So without building a similar setup the goals and ideas would be misunderstood

There's also a strong emphasis on the community, culture, shared learning, being together in the space, etc. Can't put that on GitHub.

I agree about the limitations Jan Ruzicka. Dynamicland finally made sense to me by imagining the status quo (Git, etc.) as such a strong attractor that they felt it necessary to blast into an entirely different direction.

Hopefully Swift Playgrounds lets us play around here (and one day soon just add an app to our homescreen)

Also saw something about Unity XR being available for it?

Curious if that's just support for hand tracking, head tracking, etc, or if there's anything more to it. I mean, it won't be "a new interface to Unity for authoring content spatially within Vision"

I was really surprised by the lack of incorporating physical objects into the system. Seems like augmenting reality should include augmenting actual reality, not just overlaying objects in your vision.

Given the cameras it has and the processing they are capable of doing, it can obviously do it. I'm wondering what will be exposed to developers. Are we going to be able to use the apple vision pro to imbue the world with computation? Or will we be stuck with floating rectangles?

I think I'm putting on this facething when my present context is feeling dilute / void of stimulus – ie, go ahead and wipe out this current scene – but I get the "imbue" question

I want my memory palace

On the "what sort of dev tools?" front, there's a bit of smoke from an AI/ML fire

VisionPro just seems to be simulating old media in a slightly more convenient form

I'm more optimistic — I think it's a new medium, being bootstrapped off the existing app ecosystem so as to avoid feeling empty on day 1. Remember how the iPhone (and Apple Watch) launched with effectively no apps?

VisionPro just seems to be simulating old media in a slightly more convenient form

If eye tracking is supported at OS level as a first class concept like cursor and touch then that would be interesting. The rest is impressive but meh.

I wrote that thinking about a minority report style desktop then immediately realised the dystopian ad tracking implications

I think this would be a good time to revisit the videos in the “tangible” category here:

jackrusher.com/classic-ux

… which offer many ideas that would work well in a VisionPro context.

There's a decent amount of info on the Apple developer site, but yes it's mostly the same stuff

For a device that's supposed to be for productivity there is very little on device development support. You can live update apps running on device though which is cool

I guess it's for productivity like iPad Pro is, not like MacBook Pro?

Unity is available also. It effectively has two modes, a mixed reality pass through mode where apps "render" by giving a system level 3D engine scene descriptions using USD

And a more traditional "immersive" (VR) mode where apps render using metal

Apparently Unity supports both modes

Apple has their own 3D editor called Reality Composer Pro developer.apple.com/augmented-reality/tools which is an updated version of Reality Composer that supports Apple Vision Pro

So all the dev tools are very incremental

Theoretically you can port an existing iOS AR app with very little change

If you just watched the keynote, you wouldn't really know any of this. They specifically downplayed the VR aspects and never called it a VR headset

Which seems to have mostly worked from a marketing standpoint

(Too bad it doesn't support RSS.)