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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

And Alan Kay saw this coming from a mile away and said: "What a total stone age BS this is. We already did it better in the PARC". Instead of sending shitty text files to rendering engines to parse all their own way, we should send objects. Every object should have an URL and the users should interact with these objects. And he teamed with David A. Smith and six others and they made it happen... aand it had 2d objects and it had 3d virtual reality where objects from different servers interacted and everybody saw it was cool as hell, but nothing came out of it because the world is path dependent and network effects rule.

http://wiki.c2.com/?OpenCroquet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMk9IGwuRmU

TL;DR: Future was already here, but it could not communicate with the present.

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> 3d virtual reality

3D skeuomorphic interfaces were always good in theory. I think the problem with them is the keyboard. The mouse is capable of recording velocity (which is why it is used for aiming), whereas the keyboard is binary. This distinction is crucially important for navigating quickly through interfaces. If I want to switch apps or tabs, I can typically do it with a very quick flick of my mouse. In 3D I would have to walk over to my new task which could take a significant amount of time depending on how far away it is from me.

Nobody wants to explore a 100 story virtual mall when they can just type in exactly what they are looking for. It could maybe work for Ikea, but the markets where this could work are so incredibly niche.

The advantage that computers bring is that they don't have to work like the real world. I am sure that our current approach to VR interfaces (which is 3d skeuomorphic) is a dead-end; there exists a more productive method that works nothing like our reality.

Regardless, the 2D browser was the better approach. Cool does not equate to usable.

There are plenty of situations where cool is better than fast. Anything entertainment based, maybe even social media. It is hard to match the immersion and engagement of a 3d interface. Get someone hooked on 3d (e.g. FPS gaming) and there is no going back.

Correct! But then you're actually seeking out coolness or entertainment. Otherwise you just want to do the job and get on with it, in which case fast > cool.

Of course there will be exceptions, but generally the rule applies.

While cool I'm not sure a 3D interface to a Wiki was ever the future. Thank god.

It was a phase.

There was VRML, The Second Life, Linux had that 3d cube where every side was a virtual screen. Everyone had been reading Snow Crash.

And just like virtual reality was just around a corner, it was also the time of the first digital currency boom: Liberty Reserve, E-gold, DigiCash, Flooz. More things change, more they stay the same.

Funny you should mention it, I just ran into VRML today. In AGI32 (a terrible piece of lighting simulation software) if you hit export in a rendered view that's the default format it offers you.

The more things change the more they stay the same. VRML recast itself in XML when you had to be XML to be taken seriously and now Web3D is mostly the same stuff reborn in the HTML5 era.

VRML described the vertices and edges of 3D objects, but surely it had nowhere near the power of OpenGL or WebGL. With vertex shaders and fragment shaders there is almost no limit to what can be done with OpenGL in terms of imagery you can produce. I never heard that VRML had anything like that.

In fact I would bet that a VRML renderer could be implemented in pure JS + WebGL.

VRML was declarative. It was like HTML for describing 3D scenes instead of documents.

Web3D (WebGL, specifically) is imperative. It lest a program render 3D scenes by telling the system where to put the triangles on each frame.

The Compiz Cube was cool as heck and no one will ever convince me otherwise. I used to have it configured to layer the windows in 3D space based on how recently they had focus, had it snow and rain on my desktop to match the actual weather using cron, curl and a few compiz plugins, had hotkeys to change transparency or toggle always-on-top or invert colors when I had eyestrain - gods I miss that era.

Like everyone else, I use macOS now because it's what work supports, and the desktop is nearly unusable and primitive as anything. Every day I rage that I can't adjust transparency or toggle always-on-top however I want.

You are so right. I loved that cube, and there were other customizations that truly worked, but we've traded them all for reliability, a little bit of consistency, and other compelling things. But that era felt promising it's still a little bewildering that things didn't continue on that path.

Got so many people converted to Linux showing off the Compiz effects when I was 12. Some how they ran buttery smooth on shitty Pentium III processors.

I like "sending shitty text files" as our (collective) job description.

It looks "cool", in a early 2000's kind of way, but after watching the video it didn't seem to solve any new problems other than maybe enhancing collaboration a little bit. I feel that new platforms/OSes need to have a killer, differentiating feature that makes it stand out and solve a real problem an order of magnitude better than its predecessors. Also it always seems that feature has to be "normal" user facing, not programmer facing. Real users don't care (or even know) if your whole platform is based off of shitty text files, or addressable object oriented unicorns.

To put it into modern terms, think of a Croquet world as a peer-to-peer 3-D Slack channel that anybody could host as easily as a web page. It used TeaTime and two-phase commit for low-latency synchronization, making it a distributed, real-time database of sorts. And what it distributed were objects and events, so maybe also think of it like Ethereum contracts, where the members' VMs together constitute the execution engine.

Croquet was and still is far ahead of its time. Only in 50 or 100 years will people realize the potential, at which point Croquet itself will likely have been forgotten completely :(

Copy of the wiki.c2.com article that doesn't require JS:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/157c4b7eca4105bb6d374d551a...

I think that all the people that says that its cool but unpractical are focusing too much on the 3d aspect of croquet.

The thing you should really think is that everything is done via objects, so instead of you use json as a sort of rpc, you can just get all the objects trough your browser, instead of screen sharing your computer, you can just share a sheet of a spreadsheet, a game or your file system, instead of building these thin clients on the browser, you can just share your software trough a system like this.

What does it mean "objects" in practice?

JSON is basically objects but serialized. X can also kind of share a window through the network, but as it is designed to do so, it fails on many other levels.

Think object as if it cant draw itself, lets say you have a spreadsheet object that it can draw it self in some window manager so you are updating it with some method calls, etc and you want to share trough the network, what is the difference between serializing that object over the wire and drawing it in your screen than use some sort of json to wire the data and then recreate with a thin client the spreadsheet in your browser?

I mean the difference is subtle, you can say why we dont have the same draw engine and use json yo carry the data over the network? You will have to solve syncing, etc, but if you instead use something like a croquet (I'm assuming here, I don't have experience with that system) you are sharing the object, the methods the full object, not just a text representation of it.

Doesn't this mean executing an arbitrary code on another person's computer? You could send a javascript object over network rather than some json data and then glue it with the code on the client side too (this is what google does/did with the search suggestions at some point).

yes, its a weakness that they discuss at the wiki

http://wiki.c2.com/?OpenCroquet

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