Dear pals,

Here's an update from Dynamicland. This letter is a year late, at least, because I thought it needed to cover everything, fully, and there is just so much everything.

I just want you to understand, everything, fully. I want everyone to understand everything. That's literally all I want in life. It makes it difficult to report the "news". (As Alan might scare-quote it.)

It's also why there's no public presentation of Dynamicland yet. This thing is beyond my ability to present it. Presenting a "vision" is easy, you ask David for some drawings and then yearn at a camera for an hour. But once you actually manage to emigrate and go native... now what? The thought of mailing a tourist brochure back to the old country feels almost sickening.

I mean, we will anyway at some point, because the progress of science is driven by tourist brochures. But what you really want to do is start an immersion program, bring people over to study abroad, let it sink into their bones. And that's in the works — slowly, but it'll happen.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

This letter means that the Dynamicland Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity that actually exists. After seven years of ill-fitting corporate embeddings, Dynamicland is finally its own legit organization, and will continue to exist as long as Delaware does.

Our application for non-profit status is not a bad description of Dynamicland and its goals, at least filtered for the sensibilities of an IRS examiner. After years of getting to this point, the IRS sent back their approval almost immediately. Josh suggested that they were impressed by how inconceivable it would be for us to profit.

I know it's just a name and a pile of legal forms, but it feels very comforting to have a Foundation. I'd like to keep the size small and the dreams impossible.

This is Realtalk-2020, the main project for the last two years. And good timing too, given the state of in-person community engagement.

But even from the beginning, this work has alternated between periods of building a platform and periods of exploring it. These alternations have also served as points for participants to come and go. Due to current conditions, goings haven't been balanced with comings, so this phase has mostly been just me and Luke. In some ways, it's been a bit lonely, especially with the absurdity of working on Realtalk from home. But it's also given us an extended quiet time to concentrate, which actually suits us both well. We used that time to rebuild Realtalk, completely, from the ground up.

And it's ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. Like I said, there no concise way to explain it, every attempt has ended in paralysis, so I'm just going to gush.

The new Realtalk is so real. The system is finally 100% real objects in real space. Nothing intangible, no files, directories, githubs, laptops. You stand within the poster gallery and see literally everything. Point to anything, grab it, hold it in your hand, spread it out, swap it in and out, rip it up, edit it live, all the way down. Even virtual state is visible, pinned to real objects — you can...

... hold it and even edit it. Nothing like this has ever been done before.

An "object" in Realtalk is now anything you can make a recognizer for, not just dotted paper. It's finally possible to program meaningful physical objects and have them respond to each other. And it's finally possible to make huge immersive distributed activities, with a Realtalky way of working with meaningful areas of physical space. You can light up any area you need by dragging over a Dynalamp. These areas can be anywhere in the world — you can bring your objects anywhere, or bring far-away areas into yours. Everything is decentralized, reactive, responsive, live.

There's so much more. And, I mean, it actually works. It's not a demo or prototype. I haven't written a program on a laptop in years, I wouldn't even know where to type it in.

The new Realtalk is a joy to inhabit, and there's so much that is now possible that has never been possible. It really is a fulfillment of a dream in many ways. That dream was developed and given shape by everything you did at Dynamicland with the old Realtalk.

Of course, there's much further to go, and many ways in which what we have is primitive and vulgar, when judged by even dreamier dreams. But Realtalk-2020 is a good waypoint.

This is Shawn's lab at UCSF, the site of Dynamicland's next phase. This will be Realtalk-2020's real-world road test.

The Dynamicland community space was our previous "exploring the platform" phase, and we saw many kinds of people, with many different interests, make many kinds of things in Realtalk. That was a tremendously valuable experience, and our progress wouldn't have been possible without it.

This next phase is an opportunity for a complementary experience — depth rather than breadth. What could a Realtalk project look like if we put years into it, not just days or weeks? What would it be like to transform a real-world workspace into a dynamicland, and integrate Realtalk into every aspect of a field?

It's particularly exciting to do this in a cutting-edge scientific field centered on physical materials and interactions. Shawn created the original CAD tools that made DNA-based nanostructure design take off, and we're excited about what bionano design and analysis tools could look like as distributed tangible environments rather than tiny rectangles. I'm especially excited about turning the wet lab into an immersive computational environment, a "seeing space" where researchers program the space and their apparatus to support their experiments.

And it's a perfect context to invent new representations for communicating difficult ideas. How do you grasp a 100-nanometer machine? How do you discuss it? How do you present it and publish it?

I expect this phase will give us a much deeper glimpse of life in the dynamic medium.

This is a campus that were considering for the Dynamicland school. It won't be this one, we're not ready yet. But something like this will be the next next next phase, Dynamicland's first permanent location, where we will pursue breadth + depth.

I believe there are people who would like to experience living in another world. To learn a new medium by committing to being immersed in it — 24 hours a day, everywhere they go — studying and practicing and playing and joking, like learning a language by moving to another country. I would like to teach these people. I want them to understand, everything, fully. And then I want them to leave, and bring their new point of view back to the old world.

Some of them will stay longer to write a "book" on their topic of expertise, whatever a "book" may be in Realtalk (a "book" is a living space in Realtalk), and contribute to building the first dynamic library. And of course lots of tourists will come by, for events or workshops or just to gape. But there must be natives too — not just tourists.

That's the basic idea — a kind of magical boarding school / author residency / event space / library — where everyone communicates by transforming space and bringing physical objects to life.

There are a ton of details, they're changing constantly, so I'll leave details to your imagination for now.

Realtalk is not a product. You can't download Realtalk, any more than you can download aikido, or fluid mechanics, or French. Aikido must be taught — you study and internalize it over time within a living social context. Realtalk, too, will grow through people teaching people, each recreating it for themselves and adapting it to their own needs and ideas.

I believe a school will be more fertile soil for this process than a GitHub repo.

This is our beloved Dynamicland space in Old Oakland. It's been mostly unused for the last two years, and the lease is up at the end of December, so Joanne and I will be packing it up over the next couple weeks. Let me know if you'd like to help.

It was always our intention to throw a huge party around this time, but it's still a pandemic and pandemic parties are not okay. The occasion needed to be marked in some way though. So I wrote you a letter.

It's the end of 469 9th St, but Dynamicland is just getting started and isn't going to stop. Thank you for all you've contributed to Dynamicland so far, and I hope you'll continue to be part of the Dynamicland family, at least as long as Delaware.

-Bret

We are just at the beginning.