Since our conversation yesterday at lunch, I've been getting excited by the thought of a research gallery with links from paper to the computer.

Here's the current thinking on how this might work.

You write your email about your prototype, and you cc ****************.  (This might be a member of our mailing list, if we make one for ourselves.)

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If you think it belongs in the gallery, you then go to www.cdglabs.org/ResearchGallery.  

A default label design is shown, using information extracted from the most recent email (probably yours).  You can scroll back in the mail archive and choose a different message if you like.  

If you want to change the image or text, you can do so by selecting parts of the email -- a bit like Hyperopia, except with our mail archive instead of wikipedia, and a label printer instead of a receipt printer.  If the default design is good, all you have to do is hit the "Add" button

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After you click the button, a label prints out from the printer, and you can stick it on the next available slot on the hanging posterboard.

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When browsing the gallery, you can point to any label using the laser pointer.  This will bring up, on the computer station, whatever the label links to, as well as the email conversation adjacent.  You can now interact with the prototype (or look at it, if it's an image or movie), and scroll through the conversation context.

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Meanwhile, in the gallery, the currently-selected label is highlighted in white, and related labels (on the same email thread, for example) are highlighted in yellow.

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Some thoughts --

I'd like the gallery to be in the person's peripheral vision as they look at the computer station, but I also don't want the computer screen to be behind them as they browse the gallery.  Above, the screen is at a 45-degree angle to the poster, which sort of works.  RMO's computer screen and receipt wall seem to work better together, but I don't understand why.

Each poster board has 100 slots (10x10), which might take us a couple months to fill.  As we fill up boards, we can add more to the left, and eventually add a second computer station at the left end.  And eventually have them pull-down from the ceiling (but not at first, if it complicates the camera registration).

How to interact with the label?  We can augment the boards (capacitive sensors, pressure sensors, switches, a wire grid...), or we can augment the room (camera in the ceiling).  We can touch the label directly, or we can interact via an instrument (laser pointer, handheld camera...).  All have advantages and disadvantages.  The above sketch uses camera-in-the-ceiling and laser-pointer, but that's not necessarily the best thing to do.

There are a number of components to this system (web apps, backend stuff, camera processing, etc.) and for anyone who's interested, this might make for a fun group project.

I'd like to feature this as one of the "Escaping the Tiny Rectangle" demos (as well as being day-to-day useful for us).

-Bret

On Dec 8, 2014, at 11:50 AM, Bret Victor wrote:

I would also like if each prototype had some context. Maybe who made it, the date, and possibly some of the email text.

We could make a simple app (mac or web) where you drag in the screenshot and optionally paste in some of the text, and the app prints it out a label in a standard format with name, date, etc.

On Dec 8, 2014, at 2:19 AM, Glen Chiacchieri wrote:

Agreed. The label printer seems like an easy step toward spatializing ideas. I would hope for even larger prints on the poster, big enough to see from a distance. We have the whole 3d-space of the lab to use so let's use it!

I would also like if each prototype had some context. Maybe who made it, the date, and possibly some of the email text. If this were dynamic, I could imagine touching each picture would reveal this context peek-quotes-style.

I've made one of these collages for my own work so I remember what I've done:

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(these are actually iframes with css-zoomed live pages)
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What we're driving at, I think, is a "spatial memo", but less formal than that implies. I've lately had the same thought that our emails are a terrible archive, distributed among individuals and not visually browsable. I like that our emails are informal—no extra effort needed—but wish they were archived better, or could even turn into publishable, collaborative digital documents.

Longer term, I really wish our filesystems were set up memex-style. Everything you look at and create is serialized and added to a big browsable list both on the tiny rectangle and in a physical space. You could selectively add things to a shared CDG branch and all of us in the lab would have access to it. I would imagine that this would even bleed into real life, so that the places we travel and the people we see could be in this list—the notebook of life. 

On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Bret Victor wrote:

I love it when you share prototypes, ideas, snapshots of works in progress, and weird things you've made.  But I hate it when these things get buried in the bowels of our email and forgotten.

Along with a representation gallery, I also wanted the lab to have a research gallery, where everything that everyone made would get a permanent square of reality forever, to be browsed and pointed at and walked past every day.  I'm still not sure how to do that well, for interactive things.  But after some of the recent email threads, I've come to think that a representation-gallery-like paper gallery would be better than nothing.

I'm basically thinking of a kind of group work blog (shared, chronological) but on foamcore instead of the web.  But I'd like to make it as easy as possible to add to it, so it actually happens.  The current idea is to get a color label printer, which will sit next to a big blank poster,

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and anytime you send out an email with a screenshot of your thing, you also send the screenshot to the label printer, then slap the label on the next available slot on the poster.  (If you're feeling extra lazy, maybe you just do the printing step, and someone else later will flush the label queue to the poster.)

This wouldn't just be for Big Important Things, but basically anything you made that day that seems at all interesting.  If it's worth emailing out, it's worth 4" x 3" of our lab.

As I was trawling the archives to gather some initial material (to seed the poster with at least the highlights of the last year), I came across Toby's old proto-shadershop interface, which I had forgotten about.  I really really would like us to work in a space where it is not possible to forget about these things.

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Any thoughts?

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