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.

The Deadest Generation

Most folks I know are pretty cranky lately. They cite the economy, or the wars. But I don’t think we’re being honest. My generation is dead. We did die before we got old. But we only know it on a subconscious level, and that makes us cranky.

Our last hurrah and last attempt to change the world was in the late ’90’s with the Internet Boom – although that was largely driven by the next generation. Now we’re just running on Cialis. It’s the only thing we care about anymore, or which gets a rise out of us. Dead.

I work at the University of Wisconsin, which had been a hot-bed of violent youth revolution in the ’60’s. Now, when a part time instructor named Barrett raises questions about 911, the university threatens his job. (Even as Syd Barret passes quietly away.)

John just wrote a great blog about serious and enduring issues that will have meaning long after 911 is a footnote, but even he doesn’t wants to talk about 911. Who wants to be thought of as a weirdo? Don’t say such things! I hope interest rates don’t get much higher. Have you tried Flomax?

Surely, the idea that 19 losers wreaked all this havoc, orchestrated by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan, is the looniest conspiracy theory of all time! Imagine a US government that thinks nothing of breaking into the personal files of its domestic political opposition, breaking the law to destroy its bureaucratic opposition, waging war without reason, spying on its own citizens, ignoring treaties, and “temporarily” but indefinitely closing the Whitehouse press office. This is reality, and we’re not outraged? Dead. Now, I can’t imagine that such a government could have deliberately orchestrated 911, but mostly because I think they’re too incompetent to have pulled it off. (Hey, I want to keep my university job!) I don’t know what the reality is. Either of the two opposing conspiracy theories is equally depressing. But I think that folks of my generation are old enough to sense bullshit when we hear it, and we know at some level that we’re up to our eyes in it from all sides. I believe that the recognition that we don’t truly care enough to act on this – or even discuss it – is what’s got us so down. If you’ve still got a pulse, I encourage you to Google on the 911 conspiracy videos.

I Can't Quit You Brie, So I'm Gonna Put You Down For a While

(Sorry, Willie Dixon.)

I haven’t been working on our Brie user-interface framework for a while now. We took it to a certain early level in Jasmine Croquet, in which we pretty solidly worked out user interface conventions, internal infrastructure, and the basic direct-manipulation philosophy.

Although not terribly novel (we stole liberally from David Smith, David Unger/Randall Smith, David Place/Pat O’Keefe, and, running out of Davids, Stallman/Sussman), Brie was still fairly advanced and abstract research, and we had more immediate work to do: Dormouse and the Croquet SDK release, and several projects using them. Brie had been sustained with financial support from NICT which has come to a pause. A great friend and entire world’s best salesman and demo-jock for Croquet went to Duke. So nothing got done on Brie following C5 ’06.

Brie has not yet been integrated with the current Croquet SDK. It still needs a lot of work in both the graphics and the API between private and replicated Croquet. It might be most efficient to let some dust settle here: Josh is working on new Croquet graphics, Andreas is working on 2D interfaces, and David Smith is working on the task/interactor model.

But the main thing is that I’m starting another project that I’m very excited about (more about this later), so I know that I won’t have time to work on Brie for a while. Fortunately, I do think that, say, phase III or so of the new project will be a driver for pulling Brie out of the closet again.

KISS

It is being reported that the guys at Smallthought have gotten some funding for their DabbleDB product. That’s cool.

I like the core capability: multiple-view, spreadsheet-like shared-Web access to arbitrary user-created databases. That is, server-side Web2.0 plus Group Forming Network math, as applied to databases. Built on Smalltalk.

I also think this is a nice example of building a small and simple downmarket application, and then using modest revenues to build features to head upmarket on top of your core capability. (Christensen, Moore, etc.) The eventual target presumably being Oracle’s PeopleSoft.

I’m surprised that they they took as much money as they did this early. I think this is good, but not a change-the-world killer app. Lots of folks can do this. (Laszlo (where John works) and Curl (where John and I used to work) should approach stuff this way rather than chasing the enterprise from the start.) Maybe Web-Winter is thawing?

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Pardon my demo…

Sorry that I haven’t been writing. To busy coding. News soon. But a cute thing happend today that I have to share…

I was starting a demo of some Internet-accessible collaborative spaces, and someone else was there! Frank Wattenberg, a colleague at the US Military Academy was in the same space. I had to use the in-world communications facilities to ask him if he wouldn’t mind leaving for a little while.

I guess it was only a matter of time. Time and a lot of effort to get to the point where accidents like this can happen.

Hmmm. Frank’s been trying to find the time for some instruction on how do WAN Croquet. I think he’s figured it out!

Multi-Bandwidth

A number of folks here have independently started to plan conferences in which Croquet would be used for presentation and interaction during the conference, and would continue after the physical conference ended. I think there’s a good reason that people want to do this.

Face-to-face meetings and conferences are very high-bandwidth encounters, but do not persist well.

Sharing ideas by publishing (e.g., papers in a professional journal) has excellent persistence, but is extremely low bandwidth.

Croquet is multi-bandwidth.
<%image(20060507-multi.jpg|875|556|Four users spontaneously discussing a slide presentation, and sharing other resources such as a Web site and search engine. One user is presenting live video.)%>

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News from the Metaverse

Key invitation-only conference on the future of collaborative virtual worlds.

Metaverse Roadmap site

CNET story

A Microsoft blogger, with pictures

Good blog

A key thread in all this seems to be a desire for an open-source framework that works. It looks like the only concerns voiced about Croquet for this was a mistaken impression about the licensing. (See the comments in the “Good blog”, above.)

BTW, We’re still trying to set up cool demos over the now-released Croquet Software Developers Kit. The demo at Metaverse was actually the demo we produced at the University of Wisconsin for C5 ’05 in Kyoto, which was built over the Jasmine proof-of-concept. The current release is so much better, but lacking in some of the visible bells and whisles. We’re working on it…

Are You In My Game?

My two youngest kids asked me to reinstall Disney Aladdin for the umpteenth time on Windows, and to please make it work this time. I sat down, and they knowingly left the room and turned the TV up. Presumably to drown out the funky language they would soon be hearing from Dad. But instead, I installed a Croquet application I’ve been working on.

It happens to have a dead-simple navigation mechanism that I stole from Orion Elenzil. Even my four year old can drive around in Croquet.

So he’s merrilly driving around over these hills. It took him about 15 seconds to discover that he could open portals by clicking on them, and that if he hit it right, he could drive through the portal into another space. He likes to drive.

Meanwhile, I connected from another computer, and drove up next to him.

“Hey, Dad!” he said, “Are you in my game?”

And we were off, playing follow-the-leader and hide-and-seek.

Thomas is the Toy Soldier, and I'm the Dragon. Thomas uses the buttons in the lower right to navigate.

Thomas is the Toy Soldier, and I’m the Dragon. Thomas uses the buttons in the lower right to navigate.

1.0

As lots of Croqueteers already know, we have FINALLY released version 1.0 (Beta) of the Croquet Software Developer’s Kit. (The Web site is new, too.) This is the first released version of the Croquet innards that does all the stuff that Croquet is supposed to do: shared simulations in spatial environments in order to achieve a collaborative build/use environment with social presence.

Being open source with a very liberal license, we expect a lot of stuff to be built in, around, and on the SDK. In particular, there’s still room for folks to define an APPLICATION that Joe-Random-User can just pick up and USE. There are plenty of working demos in this new release: they’ll be particularly meaningful to developers who play with them and the code a bit. More to come…