**Artifact** from Bead: 96597c32 · [canonical source](https://redfish.acequia.io/guerin/.agents/96597c32-7f1c-4e95-acd5-635673461781/2026-05-16/artifacts/anysurface.transcript.md) · session 2026-05-16 · discussion: Talk: 96597c32
- **Source video:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuepu_PPmNI - **Title:** AnySurface at Simtable - **Uploader:** simtablevideos - **Speaker:** Stephen Guerin (Simtable / Redfish) - **Upload date:** 2015-04-20 - **Duration:** 3:23 - **Views:** 930 (at capture time, 2026-05-17) - **Captured by:** yt-dlp 2025.12.08, captions: en (auto) - **Local video file:** [anysurface.mp4](anysurface.mp4) *(expected co-located; see note below)* - **Companion files:** - [anysurface.en.srt](anysurface.en.srt) — timed source SRT - [anysurface.info.json](anysurface.info.json) — full yt-dlp metadata - [anysurface.transcript.txt](anysurface.transcript.txt) — plain text
## Transcript *Punctuation and paragraph breaks added by Claude; word content from YouTube's auto-caption track. Speaker is Stephen Guerin.* Hi, I'm Stephen Guerin, here at Simtable. I just wanted to talk to you today about some of the things that we're working on. We're here in Santa Fe because we think it's kind of the world capital of simulation — and a kind of research called *complex systems* — founded by the Santa Fe Institute that was spun out of Los Alamos Labs in the early '80s. In the '90s, as a kind of group, we were thinking: how can we apply this? We're very interested in some of the complex problems that are facing our world now, that we can address with simulation — and a kind of simulation called *agent-based modeling*. Instead of having agent-based modeling sitting up on a screen or on a laptop, we think it's important to bring it out onto a table — or onto a surface — that people can interact around, and bring all the stakeholders to the table to think about the problem. Since 2009 we started shipping a new interface that projects it out onto a table and makes the room interactive. To me, that's very important: to get people to come to a shared surface — to a table — and interact and share possible solutions. The technology has changed over the last couple of years, and we're very excited now to make it much more affordable. So we're very interested: what can you just do with a mobile phone? In the last couple of years we've changed our programming — which used to be in Java and C++ — and moved it into the browser. Just using HTML5, it's very easy to deploy. We're able to launch a simulation here, capture it with our phone, move it to another surface, and interact with it — using a phone and projector in novel ways, where we can control the light and use it as a scanner to recover the height of the table, or to track objects that might be on the table and use that as a user interface. So we're opening up this platform for other developers and researchers. Think: what can you do with this new kind of technology, and what's it like now to make your room truly interactive? Because everything is in a browser, we don't really care about the operating system. It just deploys. There's no installation of software. You don't have to worry about IT giving you permissions or not. As long as you can open a browser, you can script the room. **So your smartphone plus projector — and you have *AnySurface*.** Since 2009 we've shipped over 60 tables for firefighters and emergency managers. It's changed how they do training. When they have, say, 20-year-olds on the line — the fire line — that haven't necessarily dealt with a large fire, they can actually see the dynamics and learn how it's going to play. But we've seen many more applications for what we now call AnySurface technology. We think STEM education: kids can learn how to write these models. That used to be something you had to be in graduate school with complicated mathematics to write — but now it's something we can teach a sixth-grader. Imagine a doctor projecting down onto a patient as they're operating, and seeing the data on the patient. Or imagine another researcher — and she wants to paint the room with her data. We think there's a new opportunity to change computing in general. We think light is going to change. We think the light bulb needs to fundamentally be interactive. And — what can you do when you have interactive light, and you are the author of the [room]… *[Auto-caption track ends here; video likely concludes with one or two more sentences not captured.]*
## Provenance note The local video file `anysurface.mp4` was specified as already-downloaded in `simtable.com/videos/` but was not found at that path at capture time (2026-05-17). The transcript was pulled directly from the canonical YouTube source and is co-located in `videos/` so it lands alongside the video when the .mp4 is placed (or already present elsewhere in the workspace).