I’ve written before about how I’d like to never be forced to enter a name into Croquet. A consequence of achieving this is that you wouldn’t often need a keyboard. (A keyboard can be incredibly useful. I’m not proposing banishment. I just want to be able to get along without it. Also, there’s still access to legacy apps with their textual forms that need to be filled out.)
Croquet is built on the Squeak platform. This weekend I discovered that the older PlayStation II has an Ethernet adapter, the new one has it built in, that there’s a guy porting Squeak to the PS2, and that Croquet’s own Andreas Raab has demonstrated in the past that Squeak can be ported to the PS2. I’d sure love to have game boxes be Croquet information appliances.
Now add to that the ability to create content from within the Croquet environment itself, and think of kids creating their own connected persistent worlds. Screw the “information age”, it’s the “age of imagination”.
At C5, Croquet anchorman David Smith laid out a vision of Croquet running on an iPod-sized device connected to a heads-up display in your eyeglasses. (Never mind that by then, most folks who need vision correction will have laser surgery rather than glasses.) Noting that the basic technologies needed for this already exist today, and the pace of development and adoption over, say 20 years (c.f. the Apple Macintosh and what it has wrought), David feels comfortable looking at this sort of technology horizon. I’d like to see Croquet on a PS2 be a step in that direction.
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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.
