We also noticed that there were a few commonalities in several of the prototypes which is really exciting! I proposed we meet tomorrow to distill some of those things from today's jam, so let's try some time in the afternoon, maybe 2pm to throw out a random time.

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For my prototypes, I thought of three things, which I'll describe in sections below.

I was thinking about how now we often reference other media in conversations and later maybe email links to those things or the names of those things to a person later. I was wondering what "bringing up media at the speed of conversation could look like".

I wanted it to be fast, visible to everyone present, and eventually physically reified in tokens or sets of objects that could be taken elsewhere and seen later as a sort of record of the conversation.

Here's the experience I tried out:

We'd be in conversation and if there was something I wanted to look up, I could speak it into my laser-microphone:

The system would automatically try to find an open space near everyone in the conversation and project some virtual result-sets onto the area. Here it projected onto the floor:

The results are from Google, the library in our space, and the Dynamic email list. Lasering each could narrow down to just that set. I like that idea that any collection of things in our space could have the "let me be searched" capability and its results would automatically show up when someone used this method.

A little robot could then bring physical tokens over to the conversation or participants could grab them from the printer.

As a riff, Toby mentioned that it would be cool to have a record of all the references other people in the space have brought up in conversations in the past, so it could be used to reinforce connections for frequently-mentioned topics.

I thought only briefly about how someone would be presenting Serengeti / Laser Painting to people.

As Bret, Dave, and everyone else mentioned, documentation photos could be in a binder and be references to videos. You might be able to laser a photo or video in the binder and have it displayed large wherever you point next.

I think the most interesting thing for me was that these photos weren't originally intended to be used in the space, but a presenter can use them improvisationally and fluidly.

There were some great riffs from Josh, Toby, and Bret about actually being able to interact with the objects captured in the photos, which was kind of freaky.

Toby mentioned wanting to boop the photo of a laser painting and have the painting actually brought up on the wall so you could make a fork of it.

Josh mentioned photos could capture the current "state" or "snapshot" of the system, and booping that photo would bring that state back up in all the objects shown in the picture. Josh also mentioned being able to inspect or refer to objects in the photo by pointing to them on the photo.

Bret mentioned copying the "state" from the picture onto a little play area (like a piece of paper), and having your own little microworld or "what-if" space to play around in. Bret also mentioned it would be interesting to be able to print out copies of physical items captured in the photo, like the moletank cut-out could refabricated on-demand by pointing at it in the photo.

I've been printing out tons of stuff that I want to keep around. It feels so much better to have a physical notebook than a folder somewhere on my computer. It would just be great if I could point to a page in my notebook that links to a web page and have the webpage show up on the nearest screen (loose coupling!).