I saw them both a while back, and reviewed the poster for Seeing Spaces just now. However, I haven't been unable to find anything that addresses the issue I brought up.

I agree very much with most of the general principles Victor talks about (you can see my own extensive work on making program behavior visible here[0] for example)—but when it comes to the space concept, I have difficulty finding something concrete about how the space would be used beneficially. I get the flavor of this idea that your workspace should be 'extension of your body', but at this point, years after becoming familiar with it, I'd like to get more concrete on the subject. Dynamicland/Realtalk certainly are more concrete—but my thoughts on it are reflected in my first comment.

[0] http://symbolflux.com/projects/avd

visit and donate. they need help.

it's foolish to speculate on the possibilities of a new medium on this extraordinarily limited medium. i can't even embed images here.

I'm pursuing similar lines myself, and am only able to work in spare moments due to lack of funds, so I'm in no position to donate.

> it's foolish to speculate on the possibilities of a new medium on this extraordinarily limited medium

I'll be happy to be shown otherwise, but I haven't yet found any counter-example to the idea that the 'verbal medium' is sufficient to describe any principle. So my original question still remains: is there some principle which would allow them to achieve similar generality to traditional computing without using some kind of re-combinable primitives?

Edit: to be more specific: without that, how could this ever compete with AR? People could build their own spatially interesting, room-scale workspaces without having to find physical materials to build every application out of. The fact that it can deal with actual physical things has an appeal to it, but I can't see any way of escaping the tradeoff of a massive loss in generality.

> how could this ever compete with AR?

"How could the written word ever compete with pictograms?" It's a different medium with real benefits and tradeoffs. Right now for you it's all theoretical, but one day hopefully you'll be able to see for yourself if the medium has the time to grow, breathe, expand, and develop. Funding Dynamicland means that we as a species have the option of seeing how that medium might work if it was allowed to flourish.

We'll, I wish you guys luck and sincerely hope this removes some desk time from my life :)