Wetmachine

Previous: Weapons of Math Destruction

Imagine we are at the Nasa Operations center, and it is filled with people attending to different aspects of a space launch. The operations director checks in with the different domain specialists: “Communications?” “Go.” “Environment?” “Go.” “Transport?” “Negative! We have a problem.”  Within that room, the specialists are focused on the complex applications and information in front of them. They all need to hear and speak to each other, and to see some common data on the big board at the front of the room.  As the situation changes, some of the problematic applications are examined by related specialists who were not looking at it previously.

Now imagine a distributed virtual operations center.

Continue reading

Previous: What Have We Made?

Continue reading

Previous: Demoed

In 2003, two of the world’s top computer scientists introduced their latest project: Croquet. David Reed and Alan Kay proposed a radical model for making computers work together on the Internet. With co-authors David Smith and Andreas Raab (old profile!), they developed the ideas over the next three years in conjunction with teams at HP, Intel, the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Viewpoints Research Institute, and the Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Teleplace was formed in late 2005 (originally named Qwaq) to transform this research into a practical commercial system.

And the results are in.
Continue reading

Previous: Done!

• Mobile phone and tablet access to docs, and interactive meeting participation with audio, change of viewpoint, and simple control of shared documents.
• Audio bridged to the public switched telephone network.
• The whole multi-user, multi-app realtime environment running within a single Web page.
• Automatically recording events to a tagging system.
• Connecting any objects as a concept map using stretchy light beams that you can travel along by touching them.
• Virtual glasses that let different participants see different sets of annotations on objects.
• Generating new in-world objects on-demand by sketching and painting in 2d or 3d.
• Graphical programming letting participants collaboratively program 2d and 3d behavior as they are using it.

How can all this be possible? Magic. But learnable magic.

Next: What Have We Made?

Previous: Intro
Continue reading

Six years ago I was hired by the University of Wisconsin to lead its development team on an internationally distributed open source project. Later a company named Qwaq was formed by project leaders and it later hired me and some of the other developers from various institutions. That company is now called Teleplace and its product sounds like science fiction, but it works. I’ve been blogging about the work since day one, and papers have been published by many people, but in the next six entries I’m going to try to bring together what I feel are the most significant accomplishments of all the various developers, and the science that has made them possible.

Continue reading