points by pugio 17 hours ago

Paper Computing (great name!) is something I've been thinking about a lot to help my kids benefit from tech without exposing them to the brain melting addiction of screens. I sacrificed a few crazy nights of sleep to try to build a Paper Computer Agent prototype for a recent Gemini hackathon (only to disappointingly have submission issues right before the actual deadline) which my kids loved and keep asking me to set up permanently for them.

It's essentially a poor man's hacked up DynamicLand - projector, camera, live agent. There are so many things you could do if you had a strong working baseline for this. My kids used it to create stories, learn how to draw various things, and watching safe videos they could hold in their hand.

There's something weirdly compelling and delightfully physical about holding a piece of paper that shows a live rocket launch, with the flames streaming down the page. It could also project targeted pieces of text, such as inline homework advice, or graphs next to data. It doesn't take long to imagine any other number of fun use cases, and it feels a lot more freeing and inspiring than keeping everything bound to a screen.

Github - https://github.com/Pugio/Orly (hacky minimal prototype that did the thing)

Video Pitch - https://youtu.be/-9l1x7GnmxU (filmed an hour before the deadline on an old phone with no sleep)

nunodonato 12 hours ago

this is really cool, I'd love to use something like this for my kids too. Maybe I'll try your project when I have some more free time. Would love to contribute but i'm not very skilled in python.

If you don't mind me asking, what hardware did you use? Especially for the project, I'm guessing it needs to have quite a strong bulb in order to be seen in broad daylight?

kamens 2 hours ago

this is beautiful

jauntywundrkind 3 hours ago

I love gow creatively ai is integrated in here. Amazing.

The Folk Computer people have some incredible work they've been doing too, that's definitely worth looking at for anyone interested. Their intergation of a novel display technology is really sweet too, allowing for good visibility in a variety of conditions, which I love. https://folkcomputer.substack.com/ https://folk.computer/

mmasu 11 hours ago

this is such a great idea! well done

naravara 2 hours ago

I was pretty excited when I saw the premise behind what Apple was doing with VisionPro because I figured they were steering towards this, but it seems they’ve looked away and don’t really care about going deeper into this direction.

I asked at some point if I could theoretically develop an application that could literally be controlled by a Fischer Price toy, like a little plastic car console or something. Or even potentially have a real keyboard that isn’t connected to anything, but the VisionPro can just see my keypresses and apply them as if I was actually pressing something. The former case is possible, but surprisingly difficult, but the latter case isn’t really there yet (requires too much precision and latency is worse than just using a Bluetooth keyboard).

Either way, the idea of a computing environment that meshes with and directly interacts with the real, physical objects around you is an interesting premise I’d like to see taken further with “Spatial Computing”/AR. Scanning and recording things I’m writing on a whiteboard or in a notebook by recognizing that I’ve picked up a pen and am writing something down would just be getting started.

Of course, if we’re ambiently recording everything you’re doing there will need to be some kind of regular process/interface to “sift” everything at the end of the day. This is the core of the Getting Things Done methodology. Everything goes into a big “intake list” and then you do periodic check-ins throughout the day where you review the list and decide whether to move those to a series of sub-lists to “do this now,” “do this soon,” or “do this someday.”