HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28668037

One interesting thing about this is it really falls into the current programmer fantasy of "give me infinite terminals" even though in VR there is a full 3D workspace available, might be fun to imagine embodied interfaces that are efficient as opposed to "skuemorphic" or designed for play or ease of use. I talked to Ivan Reese about this a little bit in an upcoming podcast.

Interesting comments from the founders (mostly to do HN hate damage control) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28695455

The most interesting "alternative" VR Desktop I've seen is a prototype a few years ago from the ARCAN display server project:

https://arcan-fe.com/2018/03/29/safespaces-an-open-source-vr-desktop/

It's a bit dated now, and it's still very firmly in the "infinite terminals" category. But the plan9 inspired, "GUIs are just another stream you can pipe" idea, seems like a concept very amendable to VR.

this was a phenomenal article. I'm sorely tempted to try it out. Just have to swap my Quest for a Quest 2 to get the higher resolution.

Quest 2 supports tracked a keyboard as well

this is really great. clicking to see the citations in place is a no-brainer (once you’ve thought of it that is) that improves the reading experience incredibly. The symbol definition display was also really well done. Nice work!!!

Interesting work! But my first impression is very ambiguous. On one hand, this is the UX I want from a modern academic publishing system. On the other hand, I am not looking forward to domain-specific publishing technology. Interdisciplinary work is hard enough, we don't need publishing technology to add another barrier. And then there's that eternal bad feeling about using Web technology: for how long will we be able to read this demo?

it’s a fair concern Konrad Hinsen but efforts like these are prototypes seeking to convince & evangelize people of the idea first. The implementation & standard should be figured out separately

people I’m sure said the same thing about PDF’s early on “are we sure this format is gonna stick around? Also its proprietary… owned by a company etc” but eventually they caught on

Srini Kadamati Unfortunately adoption of technologies seems to be unrelated to the considerations you list. The PDF story worked out rather well, but then there is the example of Word's DOC format, whose wide adoption has caused a lot of trouble and locked many people into proprietary software. And premature adoption of prototypes is a major disease in tech today. They just stop calling them prototypes.

also fair, but there’s a balance to be struck. Often the best way to learn if something works is to do and then learn from the experience, not iterate in a black box. I think there are some good counter examples here, like the internet … where the foundational principles were preserved & pushed for hard.

In other cases (like the web), the low friction tech / design took over but the principles didn’t. Maybe a balance here is to push for new experiments & prototypes but preserve shared values (e.g. maybe stick to open source formats, so at least they can be rendered via future VM’s, etc)

I agree that finding the right balance is the key issue, and I don’t claim to know how to do that. I wish people were at least aware of this issue and would clearly state the status of their work: experiment, prototype, etc.

“The design choices here are assuredly not all optimal — Nota is very much a prototype, not a final system.” for what its worth 😉

but I know what you mean more generally!

I have no idea what this is but I just played this game for 3 mins straight omg amazing

love the ‘onboarding’, you’re just IN IT

Amazing job, Mariano Guerra (not sure if you created this or not)!

I've played Fancade some with my six year old. It feels just shy of awesome. The engine certainly has a ton of flexibility. The voxel style does an excellent job of setting expectations. It doesn't come as much of a surprise, but it's always disheartening how difficult precise control of 3D objects on a 2D screen. Despite feeling that Fancade is much easier than practically any kind of modeling, still putting together a satisfying character is surprisingly difficult. The clickable node edges programming blocks are really cute, but it's hard to figure out how to use them properly. I mean suffers from mostly the same problems as any structured editor. I don't know. I want to like Fancade. And some really well designed course around it could help, but it's not quite there.

@Tomas Čerkasas I wish I did 😄

Absolutely love this, so many nice touches

Really appreciate how he explained his thinking through showing the path through several prototypes

if I wasn’t happily employed I would totally apply ha. I love this type of hybrid role and have already worked on interactive learning + code environments

Same here

Interesting... had not seen it. This "objects, not apps" idea is really spreading. For example this tweet and thread around it: https://twitter.com/adamtowerz/status/1443505915483725826

On this topic, here's an older email from Alan Kay to the VPRI list, about "no apps, only objects": https://www.mail-archive.com/fonc@vpri.org/msg04503.html

Here are "lab notes" from a person doing "my research on the future of personal computing". I think they are all well written and overlap with a lot of themes discussed here. Look at Universal Data Portability, for instance, or Graph OS.

https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/000/

On a tangent, it's interesting to see "future" in the tagline here.

I signed up a while ago but no invite yet. What’s your first impression Chris Knott?

Good example of "ontology as insult"

Yousef El-Dardiry you have to book a zoom intro session before you get access, mine is in two weeks

Cool, keep us posted! ✌

Shalabh I will extend this into its own topic

In general I think it’s a nice idea to build on web3 standards like IPFS, I also like that it has this objects as a building block notion. It even feels a little bit like Zettelkasten thing.

But it seems they only use go I hope their engineering and community story works out for them. It’s one thing to be technical excellent (which they still have to prove!) but it’s two other things to extend the projects metaphors to programmers and it’s users as sustainable culture.

Here are "lab notes" from a person doing "my research on the future of personal computing". I think they are all well written and overlap with a lot of themes discussed here. Look at Universal Data Portability, for instance, or Graph OS.

https://alexanderobenauer.com/labnotes/000/

I’m a bit disappointed after trying it out. I had false expectations. I thought this would be a freely zoomable canvas, like Natto by @Paul Shen but this is more like a scrollable grid view with a birds-eye-view mode. I think it has potential but none of the keyboard shortcuts work out of the box for me and there doesn’t seem to be support for common mouse wheel zoom interaction either 😞 This is a known issue on macOS: https://github.com/utk-se/CodeRibbon/issues/89