Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

My laptop picked up three extra cameras on folding sticks[1] for tracking? For MediaPipe hand pose. And chopstick wands (could be held while typing) with barber-pole marker for rotation, a small Xmas half-ornament to glide over keys for keyboard-as-graphics-tablet, and an unfinished arduino pressure sensor. Face pose, low-precision gaze and higher-precision head pointing with markers on glasses. Long-thin curved mirror bar at top of keyboard to get keyboard-as-touchpad touch events from the keyboard cam. Shallow-3D UI using eye-tracked perspective, anaglyph, or arduino LCD-shutters. I was interested in software dev inside aphysical XR, to extend rather than replace existing mature laptop dev tooling. Diverse input latencies interestingly required complex event processing and backtrackable ui state. Lenovo "portable workstation" fans would crank high just from the input handling, before 3D apps even started. Battery life under half-an-hour. But... it was oddly the flop-up cameras which most gave me joy.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ERqCfdkX0AEWTN_?format=jpg&name=...

This sounds interesting, but for the life of me I can't figure out what your project actually is.

You unpack your new laptop. With a nice ThinkPad keyboard, that's also a multitouch surface and stylus graphics tablet. Hand and stylus pose are tracked on, above, and to the sides of the laptop surface. Head and gaze are tracked. Mouth noises and speech-to-text are available. The screen is a 3D one. Your AR glasses are plug-and-play.

So, your human interface is no longer a 1970's Xerox Alto. It's time to update your dot-emacs file. What might you're new software development environment look like?

Project wise, objective was to get me that laptop, usable for daily work, and start exploring aphysical-not-VR shallow-3D ergonimicly-small-motion graphic-artist-like UX for software dev. It was basically a lot of software and hardware spikes. Python juggling lots of optical tracking, and an electron udev-to-3D-window-manager stack. Arduino bits. Laptop and body barnacles. Getting from first-lights to borderline-usables was being a slog, and then covid clipped the in-person communities which was keeping it motivated. Maybe I'll get back to it someday. Status quo seems unlikely to state change any year soon. Though it will be nice to have way more GPU and usb bandwidth, 4K cameras, less-noisy hand-pose ML, better AR glasses, maybe a real 3D panel or at least gaming latency for the LCD shutters.