Folk is a physical computing system: reactive database, programming environment, projection mapping. Instead of a phone/laptop/touchscreen/mouse/keyboard, your computational objects are physical objects in the real world, and you can program them inside the system itself. Folk is written in a mix of C and Tcl.
Is this the spiritual successor to dynamicland?
It seems super cool. I wonder if the hardware exists to make something like this wearable so the projector/camera go around with you. Multiplayer might be difficult in that context but some sort of open actor system might work.
Omar Rizwan worked on Dynamicland before.
There are picoprojectors, I think. It would be an interesting project, if you use it together with a phone that has a camera.
Bret Victor seems to propose the physical interaction on a single physical place /table. I was thinking that maybe we could use the table metaphor and link multiple physical tables and treat them as one, meaning that the physical objects would just be pointers to ui elements.
Of course, we could have a completely digital table linked to the physical ones as well, for those that do not have the equipment.
They’re doing some tests with a portable projector, not really at the wearable state yet tho
One of the things I like the most of the Discourse forum software is this sense of serendipity and founding conversations effortless because of the previous interests.
I my case, I was taking and publishing some notes on Dynamicland and publishing them in my bliki, like this one about Archive Kit and the connection between analog and digital in the Dynamicland project and how the knowledge management tools like Notion are there, but hidden in the archives.
And, precisely when I was organizing my web browser tabs, and having this bittersweet feeling about Realtalk and open source, I reenter this forum and found about Folk Computer, that is open source in the classical sense of having something to download and play with. And, while I understand the value of having a different position towards hegemonic and common practices without enclosing one into the other (like in the position hold by Dynamicland), I’m afraid that not making Realtalk open source in a more classical sense, while the complete vision unfolds and becomes mature enough, echoes what happens with Smalltalk in the 80’s and all the deviation and dilution that happened in the following decades (mainly with Java in the language front and the classical OSes in the computing front, and, I would argue, that in someway the web).
Waiting until mid 90’s (Squeak), early 2000’s (Pharo, 2008, Cuis 2009) and even late 2020’s (GToolkit) to see different variations, more aligned with the original idea but also in contrast with it, was pretty worthy, despite of the gap between research and wider culture being fulfilled with current computing dystopia in the decades without the research source code and a running, executable example.
Given that Omar Rizwan and Andrés Cuervo were related with the project and you can see even the commonality between thinks like the “whiskers” connecting physical objects and projections and even the Wish, When syntax, I wonder what make them to start Folk Computing outside Dynamicland and if, in someway, is it related with a different stance regarding open source.
In my own case with Grafoscopio and its related projects and practices, many of them empowered by Smalltalk and its tradition, I think that is important to fill the gap between research and wider cultural practices, even if it is in small niches, more so, when they happen in the Global South, as time is a luxury over here. That’s why I’m glad to find Folk Computer and its source code availability.