human-computer interaction

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

A Computer History Museum demonstration with Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk-76 running on a Xerox Alto, recorded in 2017. He shows the live environment and discusses the system.

A Computer History Museum recording of the final demonstration of the Xerox Star, the early graphical user interface workstation. It is a long demo session that shows the design thinking behind desktop, icons and windows.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

A showcase of the author's fifth-generation quad-core computer built entirely from Minecraft redstone, after two years of development. It features cache, a hardware stack, a GPU driving a 15x15 display, and serial I/O ports.

A short Unitree promo for its G1 humanoid robot, priced from $16K, showing agile motion, dexterous hands and imitation and reinforcement learning.

The full recording of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demonstration, which introduced the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, word processing, and real-time collaborative editing. It runs about 100 minutes.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

The Thought Emporium builds a homemade multi-electrode array, grows human neurons on it and attempts to take readings. It is the first part of a series aimed at connecting living neurons to a computer.

A roughly two-hour demonstration by Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk running on the Computer History Museum's restored Xerox Alto. It shows the integrated environment and language designed at Xerox PARC as personal dynamic media.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robots running a parkour course with jumps, balance beams and vaults, demonstrating whole-body athletic control.

A 1971 DEC LAB-8/e (PDP-8/e) minicomputer plays music by inducing noise into a nearby AM radio. The software is Richard Wilson's 1975 Music Compiler running under OS/8.

Short clip of Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot falling down stairs during a live demonstration.

A one-minute demo at the Computer History Museum's IBM 1401 restoration lab, where a program makes the machine's radio-frequency interference play tunes on an AM radio.

Unity's real-time cinematic teaser 'Enemies' from its Demo Team, showcasing HDRP lighting, strand-based hair and an advanced digital human toolkit. It is a short showcase of high-end real-time rendering.

Earliest known footage of Ivan Sutherland's MIT PhD work, Sketchpad, the first computer graphics system, with commentary by Alan Kay. It shows light-pen drawing with constraints in a short clip.

Apple's late-1980s Knowledge Navigator concept video, produced under John Sculley, showing a professor using a tablet-like device with a conversational software agent. It envisions hypertext, touchscreens and voice assistants.

A short Italian-language clip about the Canon Cat, a text-oriented personal computer from Canon designed by Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project. It shows the machine in use.

Olympic track cyclist Robert Forstemann tries to pedal hard enough to power a 700 W toaster and toast a slice of bread. The film frames it as a comparison of how much energy people consume versus how much they can generate.

A short Boston Dynamics clip of the Atlas humanoid robot doing parkour, jumping over a log and leaping up steps using whole-body control and computer vision to locate markers.

Jack Gallant's lab demonstrates reconstructing movie trailer clips a subject watched from fMRI brain activity, using regression models trained on hours of viewing data. The video shows the original clip beside the reconstruction.

Boston Dynamics shows the electric Atlas autonomously moving engine covers between containers and a sequencing dolly. It uses an ML vision model and grasping policy with no teleoperation or prescribed motions.

A short status-update demo from Figure showing its humanoid robot using OpenAI-powered speech-to-speech reasoning to converse and perform tasks.

A short 2009 amateur video showing an HP MediaSmart webcam whose face tracking follows a white face but fails to track a black face. The uploader presents it as humorous.

Archival footage of Larry Tesler demonstrating Gypsy, the modeless text editor he and Tim Mott built at Xerox PARC, running on the Computer History Museum's restored Alto. It is a long hands-on walkthrough of one of the earliest graphical document editors.

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

A silent demo of the ETH Lilith Modula-2 workstation running its Comdex demo program, captured from the Emulith emulator.

Kyle Hill of Because Science explains and demonstrates, using real cards, how Magic: The Gathering can be used to build a Turing machine, a computer inside the card game.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a Kollsman MD-1 Automatic Astro Compass, a mechanical analog computer from a B-52 bomber. It is part of a star-tracker inertial navigation system that computes altitude and azimuth.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down an Esinomed Infoview medical tablet computer built around an 800MHz AMD Geode board, exposing extremely shoddy construction and design.

A short Tesla clip showing the Optimus humanoid robot sorting objects autonomously and doing yoga-style stretches. Tesla says its neural network is trained end to end, from video in to controls out.

The 8-Bit Guy reviews the Color Maximite 2, a modern ARM-based computer that boots straight into BASIC. He shows what it can do as a retro-style machine.

A NASA and Durham University supercomputer simulation suggesting the Moon may have formed within hours of a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body. It is one of the highest-resolution giant-impact simulations run.

A short demonstration of the MONIAC, Bill Phillips' hydro-mechanical economic computer, at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand museum. It shows how water flows model an economy's money flows.

A short clip of the Harwell Dekatron/WITCH, the world's oldest original working digital computer from 1951, being restarted at The National Museum of Computing in 2012.

Boston Dynamics shows its humanoid robot Atlas picking up and manipulating objects, and altering the obstacle course to reach its goal. The clip demonstrates locomotion, sensing and athletic manipulation.

A WiebeTech marketing demo of HotPlug, a device that moves a running computer onto battery or another power source so it can be transported without shutting down.

Eric Bier, a PARC research scientist, demonstrates the Cedar integrated programming environment and language, an evolution of Mesa from Xerox PARC. The demo shows the Tioga editor, garbage collection, and a full graphical workstation environment.

A TV show about Ivan Sutherland's 1963 MIT thesis software Sketchpad, which ran on the TX-2 computer. It shows a light pen drawing, constraints, snapping, scaling and object-style graphics, foundations of GUIs and CAD.

A 1991 NeXT promotional video that stages a head-to-head programming contest between a NeXT computer and a Sun workstation. It shows NeXT's interface builder and object-oriented tooling producing an application far faster than traditional UNIX development.