Author: 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.

It Doesn't Have To Be Physical

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My wife recently made this video about our fight to stop a high-voltage power line proposed in our neighborhood. It was a lot of work.

She put copies onto DVDs with nice printed labels for distribution. I would have thought that seeing the physical product would give us a sense of completion and having accomplished something. It was nice, but it didn’t quite close the effort.

Then we uploaded the bits to Google Video and waited for review before it was accessible. And waited. And waited. And then one day we just checked to see if it was up. Bingo! We watched it over and over again. I was struck by how much greater the sense of accomplishment in seeing the video up on Google, available for world-wide viewing.

This is the new distribution. This is the Age of Imagination.

Cultural Awareness

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A little while ago we had a workshop discussing the use of Croquet by a group here at the University of Wisconsin. One participant raised the issue of cultural awareness. For example, the icons, avatars, metaphors and symbols used in Croquet might have different meanings for different people. After all, this is a world-wide communications tool.

I gave two answers. On a technical level, Brie would allow the users themselves to define different views of objects for different users, as suited to their needs and desires. But on a social level, I had no idea how such different views would be developed.

My four-year-old son just emphasized the importance of this. He was riding in the back seat as I took him home from pre-school. “Can I open this envelope we got in class?” he said. “It’s about poison stuff. Is that OK?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing that it was about poison, not that it was poison.

He opened it and I couldn’t see what he was doing in the back seat.

“Stickers!” he exclaimed. “Oh, and these are for putting on pirate medicine!”

User-Added Value

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It is a popular misconception that technological progress happens in a user-driven way, by “finding a need and then finding a way to fill it” as the inventor in the animated movie “Robots” says. My interpretation of Kuhn is that true paradigm shifts come from a radical concept that comes first and then gets matched to a following, often in the form of solving a problem, but sometimes through what is essentially fashion.

You’d be amazed at how many technologies are developed without actual users at all. Most of these technologies fail, of course. One needs users, but shouldn’t be entirely need-driven. The best chance of success comes with an idea that is validated and refined by actual users.

I’m still trying to figure out what we’ve learned from our users, but initial thoughts are:

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NIMBY Indeed

Our neighborhood has small lots, plenty of common greenspace, energy-efficient homes, nature trails, no overhead wires, and multiple kids in very nearly every single home. Last summer, we received a letter asking whether we would prefer a new high voltage power line to be located alongside the left of our neighborhood or by the arboretum in the middle.

We started going to “community input” meetings in the fall, and the more we found out, the more we were enraged. My wife Robin put together a grass-roots organization, WireSafeWisconin, and now this short video. (The speakers in the video are a former electric industry executive and a state assistant attorney general. The non-industrialized landscape pictures are of our neighborhood.)

We’ve been getting traction on local TV, radio, and newspapers, but these guys are pretty well armed. Time to break out the nuclear weapons. Below the fold is a letter to the editor tying the evil transmission company to the Wisconsin state influence scandal that has already brought down several leading state politicians (including state senate majority leader Chuck Chvala). With this escalation, Robin and I are beginning to feel like the protagonists in Cory Doctrow‘s Nimby and the D-Hoppers.

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Spore video

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There’s a nice video of Sims creator Will Wright explaining the new game he’s developing, called Spore. (An edited-down version of the video, concentrating on the game play, is here. (Thanks for the lead, John!)

Very cool stuff, and I think a nice addition to the set of collateral material that gets at some of the aspects of either Croquet or Brie. A very nicely done thing to compare against

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Brie Demos

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I gave a demo of Brie at the OOPSLA Croquet workshop in October, and Julian gave one a couple weeks ago at C5. Alas, no video, but the Brie papers are here and here.

This terrific video of the Alternate Reality Kit was made at Xerox PARC in 1987. So, of course, it’s not actually Brie, but it does give a lot of the feel of what we’re going for. There are a few UI differences and the ARK is only 2D, but the main thing is that Brie is synchronously collaborative, and therefore eminently shareable.

Another related thing (without a cool video) was PARC’s Thing Lab.

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What the Dormouse Said

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Everyone’s been waiting patiently for Hedgehog. There’s no way to know when the next step of David Reed’s Tea Time will be available. As David Smith and Andreas Raab began working on Simplified Tea Time for Hedgehog, there was no way to know when that process would produce results.

The Croquet group at the University of Wisconsin is not in the Computer Science department. We’re not driven by the theoretical concepts of Croquet for its own sake. We are in the Academic Technology department of the Division of Information Technology, and our interest is in building educational applications in Croquet. Adding stuff to the Croquet core is fun, but what we really need is to build learning environments with faculty. Last summer, we had the opportunity to just that, and we took it, even though we knew that the existing Jasmine proof-of-concept version of Croquet would not meet our needs. What to do?

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