David Smith - Croquet Keynote
Croquet and Collaborative Computing David Smith and Michael Ruger
Croquet is an example of what they want to produce - innovation in action. Starts off with a picture of one of the original (1984) Macs. Example of the sort of innovation he's talking about. The gartuitous slap at IE and Windows gets a good laugh - but the point is, what's fundamentally new about Windows as compared to the original Mac (For that matter, what was fundamentally new about that compared to ST 80?). It all comes from the original Xerox Parc work - Dynabook, Smalltalk, etc.
Croquet - Transmission of presence, shared spaces. The two computers being used in this presentation are connected in a shared, 3D environment. Nifty view of the shared space from each person's perspective. It's a Squeak system all the way through, with OpenGL at the bottom. Andreas Raab, David Reed, Alan Kay, and David Smith - main collaborators in this system. They didn't create a protocol (for shared communication) at the level of tcp/ip - they created a meta-protocol for object communication. They do work with it across high latency links w/o serious issues.
David actually wasn't a Smalltalker until 2 years ago, because of the speed perceptions. He was able to build a highly performant rendering engine very quickly - still jazzed over the idea of being able to modify it while it's running. Based on the performance, you could run something like Starcraft (networked) on this.
Just amazing watching the two of them describe how to navigate - instead of directories, things like "go to the left and down the stairs". Very cool - consider that for people that find PCs hard to use - and there are far more of them than we like to admit.
As in the 2D Squeak worlds - which are really neat for teaching programming to kids, btw - all the objects are editable. Anything you can draw can become a 3D object in the world immediately. And over to the side, a Flash movie playing - into David's world, looks like a D&D style gaming world. Now he climbs an aqueduct, and the crowd shouts "jump!" - laughter all around.
Internet telephony is built in. You can take snapshots (like favorites, kind of) of places you want to be able to get back to quickly.
Mind you, I'm only capturing a shadow of this talk. The things David and Michael are showing are really cool, and have to be seen to really be understood. What this puts together, in one environment, is objects, networking, and 3D graphics - and leverages them in a way to create interesting and useful views of the world. This, or something very much like this, is going to start being used over the next few years.
Questions Will it be economically useful? - it's open source, we are defining a net based economy. It's going to require some interesting applications of the technology that people will pay for. Here's my thought on a useful implementation - online training manuals for hardware. You would be able to walk through a machine of system of machines from all possible viewpoints, and truly be able to understand it. Simulation training should improve a lot . Personal or shared forums - you would be able eto set up shared space for entertainment (music, etc) and take tickets at the door. Could make the whole concert experience very different, and more accessiible. Security and Permissions? - Each object can have permissions set up. Each object owns its own access state. Seen other 3D world implementations? - David has been doing 3D for 20 years, disappointed that it has not progressed past pretty pictures. "The mosst interesting thing you can do with 3D games is blow people up. It's fun, but I don't think it scales" (laughter) What about visual programming instead of textual? - no, not a good way to symbolically represent programs. Some things like EToys can be expanded, but it won't scale with complexity. Avatar interaction? Would it be possible for avatars to (for example) pick you up and place you on an object? - yes. might even work in what we have now, but it will work eventually. Just needs to be developed. Commercial Applications - where will we see this? - Navigational interfaces (for example, store clerks). IMHO, training will be one of the first places. That, and the "sin" industry, of course. Those guys will be all over it :) Will it lead to the William Gibson view? - this will be better. Are you happy with the object model (based on ST80?) or do you need/want something better? - Politically charged question. They have already modified Smalltalk to suit their needs, and will continue to do so. Objects are the center, but they are looking at parallel architectures and scripting. Will not be tied to the status quo. They are trying to invent the future . They are using Smalltalk to rewrite and re-invent itself.
That's the key part to me. This is why Java and C# are such utter dead ends - you can't get there using static, unchangable tools like that. You need a tool that can change and evolve into what you need.
Automated testing? - no, David is not the right person to ask. Sounds like he has my answer to this :) What have you changed in Smalltalk? - Made modifications to the compiler and support for scripting.
It's Smalltalk, so we can change it while we are running - shows an example by changing window color in a browser. Will it be perceived as too big a gun with too many ways to blow your foot off? - "Yeah, use Java so you can't do anything, that's safe". Adding scripting to make it accessible to those who are used to doing Python, Perl, VBScript, etc. They would like to make it as accessible as Hypercard was.
