Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2016 21:27:28 -0700
From: Bret Victor
Subject: Re: Any progress on Room v2 documentation?
Hi Glen,

It's a good question.  I wish I had a good answer.

The videos are still there, and you can show those to people.

As for a public publication... I've think I've grown a lot more reticent.  As we get into Realtalk, v2 feels more and more like a "half-completed thought".  I've given maybe half a dozen talks about it, and I never got a sense that people really understood what it was going for.  And while we sometimes got some enthusiasm from people when demoing it live, there's rarely been that enthusiasm when people are looking at photos and videos.  Because of that, combined with how much work it would take to make a publication-worthy publication, as well as how vicious "the public" sometimes seems these days (especially wrt VR), I don't think I'll be comfortable publishing any time soon.

I want to complete the thought.  I want to have answers to all of the things that v2 brought up and left hanging -- working with your hands, working with other people in a shared space, moving objects with your hands, objects responding by moving themselves, authoring outside the screen using diagrams and objects, comprehensively seeing and understanding what objects are doing and why, using the physical properties of the real world as part of the system.  And we're so close to having those answers -- by which I mean, Realtalk is on course to plausibly address most of these things, or at least provide a good substrate upon which we can explore them.

I'd think I'd like what we finally publish to be rounded out enough that people can get a taste of the entire vision.  Something that really begins to feel like "the dynamic medium".  Instead of just "look at them pointing at things with lasers".



On Oct 31, 2016, at 9:18 AM, Glen Chiacchieri wrote:

Hey y'all, just wanted to check in to see what the progress was on the 2 Room 2 Furious documentation. I'm finding it pretty hard to explain to people what the group was working on, and also noticing that no one really has any idea that alternatives to AR/VR are even possible. I would find it personally valuable, and I think it could help open people's imaginations, if the Room v2 system had a public document.

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