Materially Objective

Our David is cute. While testing today that the material editor was working, he captured the display material of the Python timer application running on the display stand, and then applied the material to the floor. The floor, the running application, and the material editor’s texture card and teapot sampler are all counting down.
<%image(20090106-material.jpg|713|476|Editing the material of the floor, using the material of the running Python timer application. All are counting down.)%>

People get excited about Croquet for being real-time collaborative, or game-like 3D, or for embedded applications. But a key part of what makes all of this possible is that everything is very deeply object-oriented. The material of the timer app display is an object, and when that material object is shared by the floor and the parts of the material editor, they all behave the same.

About Stearns

Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse. Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation. Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.

One Comment

  1. This kind of thing is huge fun. I can remember taking the Bouncing Atoms thing in Squeak and, after enabling Accept Drops a couple of times (or something like that) dropping it on a pumped up Teddy object in Squeak Wonderland. Someone on the Squeak list had described this and it worked! Cool stuff.

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