user testing

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

A 1982 Xerox PARC film, presented at CHI '90, in which Star designers David Canfield Smith and Charles Irby give an overview of the Xerox Star interface. It shows the document-centric, icon-and-window office system.

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.

GreatScott! tests ProLogium lithium ceramic batteries, a solid-state design. He measures their volumetric and gravimetric energy density, compares them to Li-ion and LiPo, and runs durability tests at the end.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.

Builder Matt Risinger freezes water-filled copper and PEX piping capped with SharkBite fittings to see which survives. The video compares how each pipe type handles freezing.

Linus Tech Tips tests a large batch of DisplayPort cables with a Total Phase cable tester, checking bandwidth and signal quality. Many cables did not meet their claimed specs.

A seven-minute demo from the author of Notcurses, a C library for text user interfaces. It shows the 2.3.0 release, which adds Sixel and Kitty bitmap graphics integrated into its multiplane character-graphics model.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

A short video of a Boeing 777 wing being tested to destruction, finally breaking at 154 percent of its designed limit load. The wing is flexed upward until it fails.

Tested explains how Apple's Touch ID recognizes fingerprints, then tries to defeat it using fake fingers and prints, retracing methods claimed by a German computer club.

Archival 1978 Sandia footage testing shipping containers for spent nuclear fuel, including trucks ramming walls, a locomotive hitting a truck-borne cask and a rocket-propelled train crash, plus a fire test.

Fully Charged gets an exclusive first drive of the Porsche Taycan, running 0-200 km/h launch control repeatedly. It covers the car's twin-motor 800-volt specs, claimed range and fast charging.

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

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

Mark Rober tests whether self-driving cars can be fooled, comparing a lidar-equipped car with a camera-only Tesla in scenarios including a painted Wile E. Coyote wall and smoke.

A promotional video for Leap, the navigation technology invented by Jef Raskin, demonstrated on the Canon Cat computer around 1987. It shows keyboard-driven search and cursor positioning in place of a mouse.

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.

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.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether chaining many PCIe riser extensions causes loss of GPU performance. They keep adding extensions to see how far the signal will go.

JerryRigEverything puts the iPhone Air through scratch, bend and durability tests and is surprised that the ultra-thin phone proves very tough. The video is sponsored by dbrand cases.

A one-minute clip from Insider showing an Airbus airliner's wings flexing far more than most people expect during a wing load test. It is meant to reassure nervous flyers about turbulence.

LockPickingLawyer cuts through a LiteLok flexible bike lock with cable cutters in about 16 seconds, one of several videos defeating the product.

Additional camera angles of the 1988 Sandia National Laboratories rocket-sled test in which an F-4 Phantom was crashed at about 500 mph into a block of reinforced concrete. The footage shows the aircraft disintegrating against the wall.

A Fifth Gear segment in which Tiff Needell tests autonomous emergency braking systems in the Mercedes S Class, Volvo V40 and VW up!. The cars are driven toward an inflatable dummy car to see how each system performs.

Danny MacAskill tries to destroy carbon fiber bike wheels by riding trials tricks through downtown Glasgow, including on bare rims on concrete.

Toyota's short promo clip showing a Mirai carbon-fiber hydrogen tank shot with a .50 caliber round at point blank range. The bullet pierces the tank, which does not burst, and the gas simply escapes and disperses.

Project Farm tests six penetrating oils, including WD-40, PB Blaster, Liquid Wrench and an ATF and acetone mix, on rusted bolts. Liquid Wrench placed first and the homemade mix second.

A short 2001 Tom's Hardware clip that runs Quake 3 on several popular CPU and motherboard combinations of the era, then removes the CPU cooler to see which chips survive. It shows how different processors handle losing their heatsink or fan.

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 three-minute Emacs Rocks screencast demonstrating Magit, the Git interface inside Emacs, including staging and other everyday operations.

A short demo of a walking droplet on a vibrating silicone oil bath passing through a double slit and producing interference, a macro-scale analogue of pilot-wave behavior.

A Plogue developer shows the custom electronic test rigs built to measure the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis sound chip (YM2612) for the chipsynth MD emulation. It covers the years of testing and reverse engineering needed to reproduce the chip's quirks accurately.

A silent PLOS ONE video of New Caledonian crows solving Aesop's Fable puzzles by dropping objects to raise water and reach food. It shows example trials from experiments testing causal understanding of water displacement.

Guitarist Jim Lill spends a year testing where guitar amplifier tone comes from, swapping tubes, rectifiers and bias types. He finds that much of it can be reproduced with EQ and distortion in different orders.

A SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 research demo of 3-Sweep, a tool for extracting editable 3D objects from a single photo using a few user strokes. It predates modern AI image tools.

A demo of the 8pen, a gesture-based keyboard replacement for touchscreens that lets users enter text by moving around a circle. It is meant for phones, remotes and game controllers and mimics handwriting.

Jon Gjengset spends about three hours livecoding complex changes in a Rust codebase with agentic AI tools, testing his hypothesis that AI is weak at non-pattern work. He documents where Claude Code helps and where it struggles.

LightningOnDemand revives a pulsed Lorentz plasma cannon, using modern capacitors to extend its range and increase the delivered energy. It is a high-voltage, high-current hobby demonstration.