

The Future of Human Data Interaction - peter_dee
http://tomtunguz.com/visualization

======
andrewgleave
Bret is releasing the next video in this series on the 28th of May.

<http://worrydream.com/#!/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable>

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emanuer
Could someone please explain to me why these tools are not commercially
available?

This is the desktop version of the app Bret Victor created:
<http://vimeo.com/64895205>

The tools would make my live so much easier, I can not start to express how
much science needs this. Why did no startup jump on implementing them, like
"Light Table" [1]? Alternatively, why did Victor not release it commercially?
He would not get rich, but I guess he does not need to earn money anymore. His
tools could benefit humanity, from cancer research to safer cars.

I really wonder, what the reason is why Mr. Victor never published any of his
tools. It makes me sad to see such genius applications and all I can do is
look at them.

[1] [http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---
a-new-...](http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---a-new-ide-
concept/)

EDIT: Thank you @williamcotton for watching the summary (I didn't) Mr. Victor
mentioned he will make it available on github, his account is:
<https://github.com/worrydream> This is great news.

~~~
GuiA
HCI guy here, who gave a fair share of demos at conferences etc. to illustrate
new concepts. Those demos are usually held together with duct tape, and would
require TREMENDOUS work to turn into production ready apps.

Additionally, HCI researchers (group in which I'll include Bret Victor, even
though he doesn't publish at the main conferences etc., sadly) are more
interested in creating those examples to illustrate their research, but not in
building commercial stuff (which is a very different type of work).

I actually was at Victor's talk "Stop Drawing Dead Fish", and at the end an
audience member asked if he could release it. He said that if he released it,
no one would get any use out of it, because it was really built only with that
talk in mind. (which, of course, is not surprising– that's the nature of his
work)

> ' He would not get rich, but I guess he does not need to earn money
> anymore.'

You're greatly overestimating things here, my friend :)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I'm sure Bret would call himself a designer rather than an HCI researcher, and
its true that many HCI researchers sneak design ideas into HCI conferences
(Are we designers? Are we scientists? Let's just through in some pointless
vigor in what is otherwise a good design paper!). Sorry, this is just one of
my pet peeves, and its a problem we have in my own field (PL) also.

I agree most of our prototypes are held together by duct tape and do not
represent ideas that are ready to go into production. The paper/idea is the
artifact, not the prototype/demo, which exists to promote the idea. Ten years
from now (more or less) the best ideas will be integrated into products by
some entrepreneur who has the tenacity to make it all work for reals. E.g. we
hope this happens with LightTable.

------
Sven7
Here is another example from Microsoft -
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KSZuHGTcC8>

Logically we should be seeing higher and higher levels of abstraction or
languages, but unfortunately the process to get there is extremely messy...

Just take a look at asm.js or NoSQL. 10 years ago I used to work in C and when
things like asm.js come out it makes me shake my head and wonder about
progress.

It is not fair to call it going backward, as it really is a fix (on top of
fixes on top of fixes...) trying to solve the eternal problem of incompatibly.
And many of todays beautiful apps are built on an unholy amount of such fixes.
But that gives me hope.

Evolution is a highly messy and inefficient process but we will get to Bret
Victor style interfaces soon enough...after wading through a whole lot of
shit.

~~~
aheilbut
That demo from Microsoft is nothing at all like Victor's demo; it seems to be
a drawing-based interface to make the kinds of canned charts one can do in
products like Excel.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Let's try another Microsoft research demo:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Xyoh-G6DE>

Actually, I have older stuff from 2007 with videos embedded in a paper (I need
to extract the videos to youtube):

<http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/179365/mcdirmid07live.pdf>

Its a long journey from here to there.

