Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 11th Mar 2003 19:00 UTC, submitted by Mike Janger
Mike Janger writes: "What is Open Croquet? Alan Kay (one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI, etc.) is working on it. But what IS it? Have you guys looked into it?" I downloaded its 90 MB late last night. It's an 'academic' project featuring a futuristic OS 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on Windows or Mac. It requires a supported 3D accelerator (however, it didn't work with my Voodoo5 in hardware mode so it was painfully slow).
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Not having seen anything of Open Croquet, I'm going to assume that what I say hasn't already been implemented...
If you wanted a 3D environment, you have to look at everything like it is in life. If something is in front of you on your desk, you reach forward for it. This would be done by pushing the mouse forward (up). Left and right would be similar. You just change your mind's interpretation of what a mouse does. Indead of everything being flat 2D (up, down, left, and right) you make it 3D (forward, backward, left, and right). You make the mouse pointer into a 3D hand and you grab/touch something to open or run it.
Seems easy enough. But would it make a difference how we interact with a computer? Does it really matter how we look at the files/folders of our computer? When it all comes down to it, the programs we run on the computer are going to look the same, aren't they?
I mean, is MS Word 200x going to put words in a 3D format? Are games going to look more 3D than they do now? Are we going to do spreadsheets/databases in a 3D view?
A computer computes data. That's all. It's how we choose to portray that data (our own preference) that determines how different it is than another format of data.
... but it's still data...