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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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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The first real release of Croquet is nigh.... [Read More!]

When I wrote “Touchability,” it had already been a while since a buddy had shown me a haptic mouse he was working on. For example, you could feel an actual bump when the mouse enters and leaves an object (a real version of what developers sometimes call rollover). Force feedback was such an obviously good thing that I didn't even mention then the cool stuff that's now happening in this area.

As much as I think physical touchability is good, I want to be clear that I want to make Croquet applications be emotionally touchable, too. I want to capture what it is that makes things seem (be?) real. Even without physical force feedback, it should still be fun to fondle stuff because of active visual and aural responses and good 3D design.

To be sure, I'd love to add to the effect with more sensory stimulus. There are huge possibilities, and I hope folks will explore them. This stuff is cool. There's someone working on stereo display for Croquet. Others working on large screens in public spaces. I don't doubt that we'll see Croquet on small or cheap devices. There's plenty of room for innovation.

When I first heard about the $100 laptop project, I didn't get it. Sure, I saw the value in having one laptop per child worldwide – I'm not stupid or mean – but I didn't see why it wouldn't just happen on its own. Prices are falling all the time. To make this project happen, it didn't require a world-class engineering team, it required a team of world-class shoppers, I thought. My mother-in-law should run this project. I even argued with Alan Kay about it, to the point where folks had to come take him away before I was able to understand why so much effort needed to be poured into this right now.

I was wrong, and Alan was absolutely right. (Big surprise, no?) I have been convinced by these dismissive remarks by Intel Chairman Craig Barret.

More links: UN, tech and good discussion, historical background, interview.

It's been heads-down hard work around here ever since OOPSLA in October. Haven't even filed my expense report yet. (Coding is more fun.) So I'm pretty late in posting that… [Read More!]

If the dominant medium of a culture defines it, what does it mean for us when TV is changing? How will it change, and how will that change us? A couple of MIT academics are discussing the former at here. Good reading, but missing the point. [Read More!]

Last week I was asked about information management in Croquet. Editing and editorial are tough problems in any global information system. I don't have a magic bullet, but I do think we have two general approaches. [Read More!]

Last week I described the network model we're building for Croquet, and was asked about some security issues. I think the main security weaknesses to what I have described come from the ability to misrepresent oneself as the Introducer or as a machine responsible for a World, or to deny others access to a World or the Introducer by sending a bunch of messages to it that demand its attention. Part of the answer in both cases is to distribute the roles of Introducer and of Worlds among many machines [Read More!]

Last week was the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia (“the land of civilization, culture and enlightened thinking”, according to the official Web page). It has been reported that the conference was supposed to be about narrowing the digital divide. Croquet architect and all-around Computer God Alan Kay presented a model of the dynabook, er, $100 laptop to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, while his buddy Nicholas Negroponte presented one to the Pope. Picture here. (And there was much amusement in the Stearns household when we realized that this made me one degree of separation from Annan and two from the Pope.) A lot of world leaders were taking this theme very seriously, but I hear the conference turned out to be all about US control over the ICANN system for Internet domain names. Even more leaders were taking seriously this idea, as argued by countries like China and Iran, that the world can't accept ICANN to be under the control of a rogue state that practices state censorship, executions, unilateral invasion, torture, use of chemical weapons, etc. President Bush chose not to attend, in order to that he might visit Asia and criticize China regarding human rights.

The ICANN flap is interesting in several ways. There's the timely main story in the news about the relationship between the US and the rest of the world. Then there's the timeless backstory about the idea that progress is not achieved by consensus or committee, but by someone actually doing something that works. That's what the US did. We only got into trouble because it was successful. I'm fascinated by this idea lately as it relates to development within Croquet. It's hard for people who feel excluded to do other than to demand sharing, and particularly hard for them to realize that nobody “anointed” the folks who are producing the stuff they want to be shared. People do stuff and it works. Then other people want it. The trick, if it were possible to optimize such things, would be to share when things aren't yet working so that others might join in the creative fun. But too many cooks and the management cost of such “optimization” can easily spoil the soup. It's a dicey thing. I know, because I'm on both sides of the problem right now.

But the most noteworthy thing of all, to my mind, is that the ICANN flap is all so unecessary. US officials say the current system works just fine, technically, and they're sort of right, except that the rest of the world says it doesn't, and they're right too. But I think there's a much better way to handle the mapping of addresses, which we're currently trying to build out in Croquet. Whether we're the ones to do it or not, there's no technical reason that the whole thing can't be done in a way that makes the whole political argument moot.
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