spatial computing

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs at the D3 conference in 2005 discussing virtual reality. He compares VR headsets to headphones for video, an analogy later applied to Apple's Vision Pro.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

Google's early concept video for Project Glass, showing a wearer navigating a city with augmented-reality glasses that surface contextual information. It was made when the project was just starting.

Google's short promo for Project Starline, a booth that shows a life-size, three-dimensional view of the person you are talking to. It presents the technology as a magic window for friends, families and co-workers who are far apart.

UploadVR covers a Facebook Reality Labs prototype that tracks facial expressions using cameras mounted in a VR headset. The updated version captures subtle micro-expressions for realistic avatars.

A one-minute demo of Safespaces, an open source 3D and VR desktop built on the Arcan project.

A SIGGRAPH demo from Yoichi Ochiai's group of aerial and volumetric graphics drawn by focused femtosecond lasers with computational holography. The plasma points can be touched.

Waymo's 2018 360-degree video lets viewers look around inside a fully driverless ride. It is built from footage and real-time data of an actual trip on city streets.

A short 2012 promotional-style video of Google Glass showing what the headset was meant to do. It shows features like map directions and overlays in the wearer's view.

A short clip from Ready Player One in which Nolan Sorrento pitches selling ad space in the Oasis, including a joke about selling much of a user's visual field.

A short Magic Leap promo clip of a whale breaching through a gym floor in mixed reality.

Google ATAP's short 2014 introduction to Project Tango, a mobile device effort to give phones and tablets a human-scale understanding of space and motion. It pitches ideas like indoor navigation and games that interact with your physical space.

Guardian News coverage of Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 reveal of Facebook's metaverse plans alongside the rename to Meta. It shows a glimpse of the VR and AR vision.

A scene from the film Disclosure showing its virtual reality interface, including a 3D file system visualizer.

A Swedish fiber provider's short experiment in which volunteers wear Oculus Rift headsets that add lag to their view of real life. They try to do everyday tasks like making pancakes.

A one-minute demo of Word Lens, an iPhone app that translates printed text in real time by overlaying the translation on the camera view. It was later folded into Google Translate.

Magic Leap's original 2015 concept video, made with Weta Workshop, showing what mixed reality could look like. It was posted to explain the company's goals to outsiders.

A one-minute NVIDIA research demo of foveated rendering for VR using SMI eye tracking. It renders at full detail only where the eye is looking, matching the physiology of human vision.

A short clip of Steve Jobs describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind. He compares human efficiency of travel to what computers do for mental work.

A short demo of a playable Space Invaders game built inside Dwarf Fortress, with a downloadable map. It shows the game's mechanics used as a computing substrate.

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.

A 2012 Onion News Network satire in which HP announces a push into cloud computing and insists it knows what the cloud is.

A clip from Jurassic Park in which Lex says, "It's a Unix system, I know this," while navigating a 3D file system view.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy uses slow motion video to show how the IBM Selectric typewriter works. He focuses on its fully mechanical digital-to-analog converter, which turns key presses into rotation of the type ball.

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.

A recording from real hardware of Tim Follin's multichannel 1-bit music for Agent X on the ZX Spectrum. It shows several voices coaxed out of the single-bit beeper.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

Robotic Liberation by PWP is a music video demo performed entirely by an unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 and a 1541 disk drive, using only a few kilobytes of RAM and a 16 KB disk. It uses demoscene effects to tell a story.

Casey Muratori captures CygnusEd Professional running on an Amiga 2000, showing how smoothly it scrolled text. He notes the real effect is better on a period CRT.

Seventeen-year-old Ray Kurzweil appears on the TV show I've Got a Secret in 1965, playing a piece of music composed by a computer program he built.

Apple's 2002 television ad for the iMac G4 "Lamp", showing the adjustable-arm design in a playful way.

James Houston's entry to Radiohead's Nude remix contest, performing the 6/8, 63bpm song on obsolete hardware such as hard drives, a dot matrix printer, a scanner and a ZX Spectrum.

The original Amiga Boing Ball demo, written at the Winter CES in January 1984 to show off the Amiga's hardware, with a bouncing, spinning checkered ball running while the system multitasked. It became the Amiga's unofficial emblem.

A three-minute capture of SORTDEMO.BAS, the sorting visualization that shipped with QBasic. It animates insertion, bubble, heap, exchange, shell and quick sort with chiptune-like sound.

Spaceballs' 9 Fingers, an Amiga demoscene demo released at The Party in 1993, recaptured here in 50fps HD. It is the follow-up to their demo State of the Art.

A short clip of Alan Kay commenting on Edsger Dijkstra in a humorous, pointed way.

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.

Matthias Wandel shows his wooden machine that adds binary numbers using marbles. It demonstrates computation with purely mechanical logic.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.