alt Hacker NewsPaper 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)
Replies
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?
this is such a great idea! well done
This is lovely.
A bit dangerous to feed your kids the politicized slop of an LLM but you do you.