This feels momentous. I can’t stop thinking about Dynamicland and Bret Victor’s work with it. Since watching the introduction video yesterday, I am devouring content about it.

Whenever someone at an ed-tech conference showed off a new device or piece of software that involved a screen blasting my eyeballs or some glitchy 3D model on a table, it takes every part of my being not to respond with John Oliver’s “Cool”.

The folks at Dynamicland must have felt the same. They have an explanation for why they do not rely on head-mounted displays. It puts words to everything that is unappealing about VR and AR to me, two interaction modes that just NEVER appealed to me. It puts words to what we are capable of with the simplicity of a platform like Realtalk. They say:

Perhaps our most surprising discovery has been: to maximize agency, minimize what the computer knows. Every time we make the computing system less aware of what’s going on, every time we remove “user interfaces” in favor of noticing simple spatial relations between objects, every time we remove programmed rules in favor of socially-agreed-upon practices, our systems become more flexible and composable, and new dimensions open up for improvisational modification.

Virtual worlds, by contrast, must maximize awareness. In screen-based systems and VR, the entire world is simulated. Anything the computer is unaware of, simply doesn’t exist. AR has the further challenge of inferring a high-fidelity model of the real world on which to overlay its virtual world. Anything the computer is unaware of will generate a clash between the real world and its virtual overlay.

A person wearing a head-mounted display is a guest in someone else’s house. The totalizing nature of the simulation, and its overwhelming computational complexity, prevent anything like the constant remixing, reworking, and improvisation that we regularly see in Realtalk.

This is exactly it. I love computers, but I don’t believe that I ever understood that love until yesterday.

My heart feels full in ways that it did not feel before.