In What Is It About Immersive 3D?, I claim that being immersed in among the application components allows and encourages us to mix and match among bits and pieces of different applications. That is, we're getting rid of the idea of having separate “applications” on a computer.

I forgot to mention the other aspect of immersive 3d: that we want to get rid of the computer. Well, actually, that we want to make using each application object feel like a real world object, not a computer thingie. The direct manipulation feel makes it easier to work with stuff, and the lack of indirect abstractions and symbols makes it easier to understand.

A few examples below the fold.
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Internal problems in Brie. Some nasty, some trivial, all annoying. We'll work 'em out, but time to think of something else for a while. How about huge cultural paradigm shifts?

Clearly, something's going on in the area of intellectual property. The old models are not serving. Everybody's got something to say. (Here and there are some current MIT community examples.) On the one hand, Apple tries to sue companies for using a Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointer (WIMP) look-and-feel that they themselves didn't invent, and they won't let me rip the songs I legally bought from them. On the other hand, they want to use the name “Apple” despite clearly being in competition with Apple Records in the music business, and they produce a variety of devices in the new-cultural rip-mix-and-burn chain. Are they schizo, or is it just opportunistic business? I think it's another data point towards the conclusion that we're waiting for Thomas Kuhn (in a broad sense) to point the new way.

How can we understand intellectual property rights in a digital age? I propose that we try to get at what we really mean in terms of some established axioms.
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When something new comes along, we tend to describe what it is. If it's something important, it takes a while to figure out why it's important – what it is that is really different. The description of what something is tends to be somewhat dry and technical and it misses the point. For example, a telegraph is an encoder and a decoder in an electric circuit. But couriers and semaphores involve coders and decoders, and other stuff has had electric circuits. What was important about the telegraph was that it provided instantaneous long-distance communication. This is also what was important about its successors like the telephone and radio, even though the descriptions of what each is are quite different than that of the telegraph. It's not as simple as describing what a new invention does for people. Quite often we don't know how it will be used.

Since I first heard about Croquet, I've been trying to figure out what is really important about the immersive 3D that everyone first notices about it. I think I now have an idea. It turns out that the “immersive” part is key.
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I don't know why software projects need meaningless codename, but they do. Maybe that's how this ethereal stuff becomes “real.”

I can't say that all our U.Wisconsin projects for Croquet will be named after cheese, but I wouldn't be surprised. Not sure why Wisconsin means cheese, yet we start with a French cheese. But Brie is cool. My wife lived there for a while. The have big parties when the new cheeses come out, but you can also buy this old wrinkled stuff that you can't get here, which my wife calls “fromage morte.”

So, what is Brie? [Read More!]

My wife is getting frustrated with the medium as she constantly checks for the latest in the raging debate in her favorite mailing-list. Meanwhile, writers and researchers lament the loss of the art and practice of writing letters.

There's no spec for Croquet. Although the architects have mature experience and good taste in evaluating technologies for what does and doesn't work, I don't think they set out to achieve a particular set of characteristics. Yet one of the things that appeals to me about Croquet is the characteristic that it is agnostic about what mode of communication works best: Synchronous like face-to-face conversation and chat, or asynchronous like email or a handwritten letter; Seemingly anonymous like most of the Web and multi-player games, or full of social cues like voice and video communication. Croquet is equally facile at all.(*)

But what works best? When? In what ways? My boss, Julian, has been bringing together a very interesting group of educators and scientists as initial users of a Croquet Collaboratory that we are building. Although they come at it from perspectives that range as far as art, public health, and games, I think they are all vitally interested in this issue. By having a single medium that provides all – a meta-medium – they can study group interactions and observe how different communication techniques affect outcomes.

(*) I'm not quite sure what it says that I'm comfortable saying this, even though the effectiveness of both persistence and naturalistic voice and video have only been suggested in demonstrations, rather than proven in practice. Is it vision, confidence, or faith among the developers, or naiveté and the academic environment?