Alan Kay is working on a complete reconceptualization of what computers can do. It is currently called Croquet, and it is built on top of Squeak. Here is a piece of the project summary:
The landscape of possibilities has evolved tremendously in the last few years. Without a doubt, we can consider Moore's law and the Internet as the two primary forces that are colliding like tectonic plates to create an enormous mountain range of possibilities. Since every existing OS was created when the world around it was still quite flat, they were not designed to truly take advantage of the heights that we are now able to scale.The screenshots are utterly stunning.
Re:Disappointing...
rafael on 2004-07-05T06:17:48
Except that apparently, many users can share the same 3D space.(Anyway, 3D always looks as uneffective eye-candy to me.)
Re:response-rant
ziggy on 2004-07-05T16:46:02
Done poorly, 3D is needless eye candy. However, I naturally organize things spatially, so it's easier for me to tell you where to find a book on the bookshelf than it is for me to describe the book's cover or some other visual property of it. With better tools, maybe we can find better uses for 3D visualization beyond MMORPGs and simulations of flybys of Saturn's rings.But that's not the stunning bit. What I find stunning is that I can run an application -- a browser, a presentation, a simulation or whatever -- and have that application transparently open for multiuser collaboration. It's not the 3D presentation that's jaw dropping, it's the stuff that's painted in 3D, and all of the complexity that's hidden under the covers.
Even if they were to drop the obigatory "this is futuristic -- it's in 3D" presentation for the investors, what they have accomplished is still quite impressive.
Re:response-rant
brev on 2004-07-05T17:34:00
You're making my argument for me. Your bookcase is effectively a 2-d interface. A 3-d approach would be to strew all your books across the room.
With better tools, maybe we can find better uses for 3D visualization
3-D might be new to computers, but everywhere else we've had it for, oh, 350,000 years. It's still not used to visualize much, even when cost was no object. The exceptions have been architects, doctors, or people who fabricate stuff. The commonality -- their whole business is understanding 3-d objects.
Re: collaboration, from what I read it looks like the Squeak UI toolkit has this neato p2p state-propagation model built in. I agree that's the really, really cool part.
Problem 1) legacy apps can't possibly work like that -- they could be hacked in, but their essence MUST be hosted somewhere.
Problem 2) their assumption of easy collaboration across the whole internet, with mobile code, etc., is a bit disturbing.
Re:response-rant
ziggy on 2004-07-05T17:59:46
Not really. Books, book shelves and book cases are all 3D. There are the books laying on top of the books on the shelf, books laying in front of the books on the shelf, and books on the pile laying against the shelf.You're making my argument for me. Your bookcase is effectively a 2-d interface. A 3-d approach would be to strew all your books across the room.;-) Seriously though, there's a whole branch of psychology that examines the different emphasis people place on sense perception. I don't pretend to know much about it, except that there are different kinds of perceptions we can emphasize: textual, visual, spatial and audible. And I know I have a better shot at telling you where a book is on a shelf (or in a pile), where the shelf is in the room, where the room is in the building than I have at describing what's on the cover. Especially if it's not an O'Reilly book.
;-) Yeah, that is rather disturbing. But we survived the Morris worm, and we survived the September That Never Ended. And for the most part, we're surviving the onslaught of security breaches in Windows.Problem 2) their assumption of easy collaboration across the whole internet, with mobile code, etc., is a bit disturbing.I have faith that what Alan Kay and his team are inventing will survive vandalism and scaling to the size of the web.
Re:response-rant
brev on 2004-07-05T21:40:35
Maybe we're talking past each other re: spatial organization.
I agree that spatial techniques are the best way to organize things, for all sorts of reasons, including the psychological.
I just think that for most purposes, the sweet spot for clarity is two spatial dimensions. With three dimensions, you have occlusion and distortion. Four might be worse. Five is right out.Re:response-rant
jmm on 2004-07-09T13:31:19
I'd put the sweet spot at 3.5 dimensions. I want a large collection of (mostly) 2 dimensional spaces. A single bookshelf is (mostly) 2 dimensional - but there are multiple bookshelves in multiple rooms and you have to index amongst them as an extra dimension. And some of the storage spaces are tables instead of bookshelves - they have 2 dimensions to find a pile and then a third for depth (except that piles tend to flow together and merge somewhat:-)
