I feel like I hit what I'm aiming at maybe half the time when I turn a laser on.

That's why all of the laser UI is designed so you can point in the general direction of something, and then correct to where you meant to point.  Almost all objects respond to the laser entering them or going up in them, not the laser going down in them.

In the case of a wall-painting app, I might use a quasimode.  The laser would only leave paint while you're holding down a button on the iPad.  For example, the iPad would have a color palette that you could reach from your left thumb, and you would have to hold your thumb down on a color while painting.  (Like photoshop, it would probably show the outline of the brush as a "cursor" even when you're not holding down the button, so you can see where the paint would appear.)

 I wanted the precision of drawing with your hand vs. the shakiness and imprecision of the laser.

Our laser tracking is pretty crude right now, but there's a lot you can do to smooth the signal in something like a painting app.  Heavily time-averaging the point would give you a slow but precise line that would "chase" the laser point.

On Jun 22, 2015, at 9:27 PM, Glen Chiacchieri wrote:

I thought that didn't even need saying! :P

To answer your question: because I don't know how to interact with the laser system :). Also, I wanted the precision of drawing with your hand vs. the shakiness and imprecision of the laser. I feel like I hit what I'm aiming at maybe half the time when I turn a laser on.

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 9:17 PM, Bret Victor wrote:

Why not draw directly on the wall with lasers, using the iPad as a color/tool palette?

On Jun 22, 2015, at 8:56 PM, Glen Chiacchieri wrote:

I was wondering what it would be like to draw on the wall:

<demo.png>

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it doesn't feel good to draw in one place and see the effects in another. Oh well.

See the attached video for what the drawing process looks like. (Ignore the laggy drawing.)

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 9:26 PM, Bret Victor wrote:

Here is the "wall audio player".

[IMG_7891.mov]

It's a little silly (the whole project is a little silly, which is nice), but it's getting at some general ideas --

 - every process should have a place in the world

   - you can think about it in that place

   - you can bring other people over to that place

   - you can get to it by pointing to that place

 - every process should indicate when it is working

 - every process should indicate when it has been working (history timeline)

The daemons on the "engine room" board don't do 2 and 3 yet, but they should.

<demo-small.m4v>