Lambda the Ultimate

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I think we can give him the venue to say such things because he was so far ahead of even our time, back in the 1960s and 70s.

The Croquet demo is good, but like Kay says, it should be no surprise that this can be done in 2003. The surprise is the horrible state of hardware and software required to even do so.

Kay at his best, sitting with a small group of people where he can let his hair down and use the F-word. He couldn't do that at etech.

One of my tasks (which I never completed) was to create an environment for users to interact and setup game reservations. A lot simpler than the environment presented here of course, but a similar purpose. At the time I was using a 3D package from RenderMorphics (which was later bought by Microsoft, which used its engine as the basis for Direct3D as I recall). For obvious reason my package was developed using C++.

I also developed some actual multi-user games, which were completed (a Doom like shooter, a flight simulator, etc.) A really fun time.

What I noticed, which matches some comments made by Alan Kay about bandwidth and latency, is that 3D environment are actually better suited for this sort of collaboration than 2D. This is because in a 3D environment precise location isn't that important. It's sufficient that other avatars perceive you to be approximately where you're supposed to be. And the farther you are from each other, the less exact this approximation needs to be. Because of this, you can cut down on bandwidth even more by using local extrapolations (this was also touched on in this presentation). So instead of transmitting simple positional data, you attempt to transmit intent.

The result was that the 3D flight simulator used significantly less bandwidth and was much less susceptible to latency issues than a 2D Street Fighter type game. Given that the motivation to use cable networks instead of the Internet revolved around these issue, it was interesting that I could demonstrate to the CEO that my game could also work on the Internet.

By 95 I had left the company, and its now doing something completely different.