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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While many wizz and blow-your-mind scenarios outlined by enthusiasts may sound cool, the problem with 3D evironment is much like the problem in 3D adventures. Once you've run a few times between locations, you begin to notice the amazing time wasted due to the need of moving around.
Those 3D environments all have the same problem: they throw away years of UI research on usability. The reason the mouse is so great compared to a keyboard is that it can move around all the desktop rapidly. The reason tree-views are so popular is that they can show a lot of info in a small area and allow growing and collapsing part of the information. The reason why we have alt-tab, taskbars and the Dock is to know what applications are out there and switch rapidly between them. And so on.
The Crocket portals are cool, but utterly impratical for foundamental reasons, not just because of implementations details. Moving in a world were you have a god-like overview (2D) will always be simpler and faster than a world where you have only a small partial view (3D).
I will be impressed when someone comes up with a good usability idea and then translates it using the best technology. Croquet goes the other way round: it takes technology (CPU, 3D cards) and tries to artificially come up with ideas made possible by the technologies.