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Thinking about how in Anathem, the Avout live a low-tech lifestyle except for the three tools they have made from high-tech newmatter: their bolt, chord, and sphere. Newmatter in any other form is banned.

Constraining to those objects puts the focus on learning to use them well. It means techniques for using them can be shared across people. They become like objects in nature, with fixed properties we can reason about.

(I am thinking about AI)

Experimenting with sending content from the tabletop to other screens. Makes it feel more like the entire room is my desktop.

My tabletop computer setup

The surface is a stack of: plywood panel supports, TV, plexiglass, screen protector, IR touch frame and plywood frame. Watch the build video on Youtube or check out software demos.

Parts list

  • Hisense 55" TV - $200 at Best Buy
  • 43" IR touch screen - $164 at Walmart
  • 50" anti glare screen protector - around $80 at Amazon
  • ~43" sheet of ~1/8" plexiglass - I got this off the sidewalk. Plexiglass is definitely available but kind of annoying to get big pieces shipped so it was a great find.
  • Mini PC - $330 at Amazon. I had this from an earlier project. Any sort of PC or laptop could work.

Bezels and insetting

The touch frame is inset inside of the TV. This allowed me to get a flush surface, where when I used a 43" TV the touch frame had to sit on the bezels, some of which stood out more than others, making things uneven. Insetting has worked well for me but it does make it a more complicated process. The easiest setup would be a 43" TV with wide, flush bezels but I haven't tracked that down yet.

Touch frame thoughts

I got the touch frame first and it's big enough I can't yet justify upgrading to a bigger one, but if I was starting fresh I might try something even bigger. Similarly IR touch is much cheaper than capacitive and works well, but it does detect touches a bit above the surface, which is mostly an issue for me when writing on it, because I think I don't pick up my finger as much between letters. If I stick with my overall setup I think I'll try a capacitive touch overlay sometime.

Software setup

Touch frames are generally plug-and-play. That I inset this one does mean I had to adjust both the display and the touch mapping to be only a portion of the screen. This was very doable on Linux with the window manager Niri, and I imagine there are ways to do it across OSes, but it's something to be aware of. Again here a size match between the TV and frame would make this simpler.

My highlights from the maintenance chapter of How Buildings Learn:

Put this one together from phone snapshots. I kind of like the page bend distortions but it was very fiddly to get the masks in place. Maybe next time I'll just try and take slightly less distorted shots.

Collage and commentary for After Work We'll Have Each Other

Behind the scenes this was the first article I'd done on the tabletop with a workflow of printing, highlighting, scanning. Will try more. Also experimenting more with adding commentary (which I dictate, then adjust/move around).

Nesting canvases on the tabletop using collage covers:

I'd love to come up with something more elegant for going back up to the parent (currently it's just a pinned square next to the cover area). Breadcrumbs feel like it'd be kind of giving up on the canvas...

Trying out tabletop as album playing canvas:

Still unsure if the dream is that ultimately all of this goes on the same canvas. It is nice to find myself returning to the same sorts of functionality again and again (blocks, drag into to activate, write to navigate).

had a cursed thought about setting up the touch frame i use with an axidraw. so then a programmed path would go in through a stylus and then be reread as touch events. interesting thing would be to have the axidraw repeat and then augment/glitch with additional organic touch events.

Collaging from a platform into the tabletop:

I want to combine this with screenshot sources, thinking of a physical + digital scrapbook page.

Platform tracking on the tabletop:

Calibration still a work in progress - between mapping the camera to screen and the large touch targets of the pegs I'm using to hold the platforms up it turns out to be tricky. Could always capture more and make recrop easy but would love to dial it in.