
Laser Socks – a sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing - Glench
http://glench.com/LaserSocks/
======
germinalphrase
Interactive and augmented environments are far more exciting to me than the
promises of VR. Why escape my life when I can make my lived world better?

The Dynamicland stuff is particularly fun due to the promise of accessibility.
A mature version of this vision would be tremendously exciting for me as a
high school teacher.

When I read about VR in education I mostly see "experiences" as a defining
value of the platform. This is fine, but less interesting than the potential
for augmented environments to enhance my nuts-and-bolts professional practice.
I want to be able to create personalized tools for interacting with media and
ideas (extant and live creations) and managing interpersonal
communications/interactions in my room. I can see immediate value in the
ability to build branching lesson plans with trigger-able subroutines to
provide more individually appropriate experiences to students. I feel strongly
about non-linear learning opportunities, but they're logistically difficult.
Likewise, to create modifiable one-to-one/one-to-some/one-to-many
communications channels to smooth the experience of working with 30-35 people
when I can only be in one place at a time (and to mollify the
anxieties/anger/angst of being a teenager expected to publicly perform in a
crowd).

There are any number of small tools I would like to build. I know what
problems I want to fix to improve my efficacy, and I don't need polished
consumer products to do that.

If "Hypercard for the World" allowed me to start hacking together useful tools
for myself, I would shower them with love.

~~~
qq66
"Why escape my life when I can make my lived world better?"

Some people could really enjoy escaping their lived world. Imagine if the
costs on VR came down enough so that a person living in a slum in Calcutta or
Rio de Janeiro or Chicago could walk through the Taj Mahal, or Petra, or sit
in a Harvard University lecture hall? What if they could just make the smell
go away for an hour?

It would greatly improve the quality of their life even without solving the
much tougher challenge of getting them out of poverty.

Considered expansively enough, virtual reality for all five senses could be a
substitute for almost any consumption experience. People could eat protein
paste and have it taste like filet mignon. They could walk between the same
two rooms in their house but feel like they were in Versailles. VR could
massively reduce the global demand for energy and materials.

~~~
panic
A person's interactions with the world are not "consumption experiences." This
sort of VR future would turn humanity into ghosts -- haunting a virtual world,
unable to truly inhabit it or exercise any degree of agency over it.

~~~
loa_in_
I'm eagerly awaiting social VR. Since playing multiplayer games allows people
of now to have unparalleled social interaction and insight into other person,
being able to freely explore virtual worlds together would greatly increase
integrity in society, even if at very least teaching various social skills.

~~~
jayajay
Yeah, there's no reason humans can't interact with the physical world through
auxiliary VR worlds. We already do this with websites, VR will eventually be
an interface to interact as a connected robotic device.

At the same time, the person in VR would be giving learnable information to
the robot while they are controlling it (e.g. like a driver for a self-driving
car). Eventually, you could wade the robot off of VR and it would be able to
carry out the task. So, VR could also be a way to teach robots.

------
westoncb
Here's where the 'pointing toward the future of computing' bit comes in:

 _Similarly, Laser Socks is a fun demo by itself, but what we as researchers
hope it points toward is a new type of computing that instead of isolating
humans in artificial digital worlds, provides a medium of expression that is
continuous and integrated with our physical and social worlds_

So this is one 'application' built on an 'OS' developed by Bret Victor and
Robert Ochshorn which was called _Hypercard in the World_ , though the latest
version is called _Realtalk_. More info here: [https://limn.it/utopian-
hacks/](https://limn.it/utopian-hacks/)

~~~
elefanten
Wow, that link. What an insulting, self-important piece of drivel. It casually
asserts that everyone who isn't Alan Kay or Bret Victor is dead-eyed, soulless
drone. That all the work done in tech since Xerox PARC has been a series of
criminal tragedies. Hope this guy scoots off elsewhere soon, to write some
more fantasy time "ethnographies"

------
dang
High praise at
[https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/911269264392306688](https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/911269264392306688).

~~~
ipsum2
Which isn't surprising, considering that Laser Socks uses Victor's team's
codebase.

------
ideonexus
An amazing example of the possibilities is the UCDavis Augmented Reality
Sandbox, which uses a projector, an Xbox kinect, and sandbox that lets you
wiggle your fingers to create rain, dig rivers and lakes, and see how water
flows through an environment. My kids and I were blown away by it at a science
festival last year. It's all open source and you could build your own for less
than $500 I think:

[https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/](https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/)

~~~
Pica_soO
I wish we had that as a level editor for the rts-game we work on.

------
lifeisstillgood
So if I get it, we are this is that first demonstration of a mouse, carved
From a block of wood, moving windows around on a screen.

One day soon we will all have cameras and projectors and sensors in our home
and office environments and be able to improvise new interactions.

Seems ... plausible. Where do I get a block of wood the right shape then?

------
RUG3Y
Sounds like a lot more fun than the game "laser eyes" that we used to play
when pointers became common in the 90s.

------
jayajay
I can see this being interesting in traffic applications. Instead of the
red/yellow/green traffic lights we have at intersections today, instead
imagine a "laser counter" system that would "tag" various vehicles as they
approached and would send a special signal to the car whose turn it was to go.
The car, being self driving, would be integrated into all of this and then
proceed, assuming the other cars follow the same contract. All it takes is one
car to not understand the contract for this to be pretty scary though. Maybe
the road could be tolled: the spike-track or barrier won't go down unless your
car has proven that it can cooperate in the intersection protocol.

------
ge96
What is the light panel on the ground? To me it's like a conveyor belt/piece
of paper slides to block some of the light?

edit: that's funny "two lines of code" then mentions the hypercard that
detects the laser pointer

~~~
Glench
From the article:

> Players try to point a laser pointer at their opponent's socks while dodging
> their opponent's laser. Whenever they score a hit, the health meter closest
> to their opponent's play area fills up with blue light. Whoever gets their
> opponent's meter to fill up first wins.

The light on the ground is a piece of posterboard is that has graphics
projection-mapped onto it to signify a person's "health" in the game. It would
be cool if there were a physically-actuated health bar like you're describing,
though!

The module that detected laser dots was like a page of code. It really wasn't
complicated at all.

~~~
ge96
I like the idea though, I mean a smart home deal, making everyday boring
objects cooler, assuming you also have Augmented reality.

I thought it was like a back light panel of a computer display pretty cool
it's a projection if I read what you said right.

Yeah I wasn't 100% serious of what I said, it's like I don't know if this is a
good analogy "yeah it's easy with the push of my foot, I can turn oil into 60
mph" with regard to a car.

------
danvoell
This is hilarious. Congrats! It's a pretty big leap to discuss the future of
computing but I welcome a world of social interaction, laughing and playing
games in our socks. I wanna play this.

------
victornomad
I've seen many installations and games that have physical interactivity. What
is special in this game? Is the system that they are using? Any link with more
info?

~~~
Pulcinella
The system used to build this game is much more general than the type of stuff
you might see at a mall installation, for example.

For more follow @Dynamicland1 on twitter.

~~~
Glench
Laser Socks wasn't a special-purpose installation built for demo purposes. It
was a game that normal people could build in their living room in under an
hour given the right "operating system". It's one instance of a much bigger
idea — that one day everyone could be authoring dynamic/physical content in
this new medium just like the written word is used today.

------
obilgic
off-topic: there was a text based game featured on here some time ago. It was
black and white, and the goal was to farm more and more energy and eventually
screen would black out and system would reset. Does anyone remember the name
of that game?

~~~
GauntletWizard
It sounds similar to Spaceplan:
[http://www.crazygames.com/game/spaceplan](http://www.crazygames.com/game/spaceplan)
\- Not quite black and white, not quite text based, but similar. I loved it,
and was surprised to find that there's an extended edition available on steam:
store.steampowered.com/app/616110/SPACEPLAN/

~~~
obilgic
There we go !!! Thank you. Below is the link that was featured on HN. I
believe it was a bit simpler back then.

[http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/](http://jhollands.co.uk/spaceplan/)

Edit: I was able to find the HN post as well:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279552](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12279552)

------
gr33nman
This is awesome. Source? :)

------
samstave
This is awesome!

------
baxtr
This is sooo cool!!

------
lasersox
Haha!

------
el_don_almighty
dammit...I NEED THIS FOR MY HALLOWEEN PARTY

But I've been a manager for 15 years and my real geek skills suck

Help me!

------
afterburner
Yeah, laser tag is fun.

