Hi, I'm Chaim. I'm Luke. And we're gonna show you La Tabla. which is a magical table. You put things on it and they come to life.

You play with La Tabla using the most powerful controller ever invented: tangible reality.

The first thing we built was this world full of little creatures.

The magic of La Tabla is that you use your bare hands to interact with the world, which creates all kinds of surprising possibilities.

So La Tabla reinterprets reality into all kinds of amazing new things. Blocks, like little plastic blocks, can become musical notes. Construction paper can become pinball. And drawings can come to life as animations.

And La Tabla introduces a new way to play. Rather than interacting through screens or phones, the world itself becomes the interface. And people can come together in this world, and invent new ways to play with each other.

So when I first started working on this project, I was thinking in terms of games, and the first thing I made was Pong, because that's kind of an early game.

And it's interesting, because players can make their own paddles and it supports an arbitrary number of players out of the get-go. But in the end it's just like wasn't as interesting as I hoped it would be.

But then one day some friends came over and just started doing some really wild stuff with the system.

And they started carrying the little creatures in the palms of their hands.

And they built a whole world. And that's when I realized that this isn't about making games for players to play. It's about encouraging people to invent new ways to play themselves.

Chaim showed me some of those drawing experiments he was doing, and that immediately made me think of musical scores. What if you could draw music that came to life as you wrote it down?

So the first thing we did with this was just turn whatever was drawn on the paper into pitch.

But we rapidly realized that we could make music with anything, whatever was around.

We could even make beats out of beets!

That's Vi Hart there, a wonderful musician and chef.

We discovered that we could use objects that move themselves, like this little robot that follows lines. So suddenly this became a dynamic score.

And if you reached in with your hands, the music mode could suddenly become a live instrument.

People made some really beautiful compositions with this.

After all the fun we had with music, I decided to return back to the making games, and made a pinball game. It wasn't just pinball, it was a pinball construction set.

We use a game controller to drive the flippers, but the real fun is in manipulating the table itself. It's like the ultimate tilt mode.

One of the purest examples of giving players the space to invent is the animation mode, where different pieces of paper become different frames of animation. What you decide to put in this paper is entirely up to you.

La Tabla is about encouraging players to invent new ways to play, to see their world as a collection of toys to remix.

The lesson in the end is that it's not about the games that we make. It's about giving players the space to invent their own play.

Our phones and our laptops and our game consoles have isolated us. Even when we're together, we're apart. We don't look at other people, we look at screens.

La Tabla puts people back together into a shared world, this wonderful one. We can make eye contact and look at each other.

So really, it's just people. Humans, playing with stuff, together.

La Tabla is open source. Check it out at tablaviva.org. If you want to learn more about these ideas, you should also check out dynamicland.org.

We have La Tabla running over there. We have a brand new multiplayer game that we did not show in the talk, that we made just for EGW. Come over and play it at the end of the session.

Thanks!