Croquet: a menagerie of new user interfaces

Abstract

A new architecture like Croquet presents numerous opportunities and challenges to create useful interfaces to enable access to the underlying power of the system. In particular, our focus on an integrated 2D and 3D system ensures that we have a rich intellectual environment within which to explore. This experience is similar to the development of the original modern windowing user interface created by Alan Kay, his team at Xerox Pare, and his Squeak team (Ingalls et al., 2002; Kay, 1996). Just as those teams did, we also have an infrastructure that is rich enough to allow us to perform some deep exploration into the presentation and manipulation of rich media expressed in 3D, and in the negotiations through these rich media worlds. A number of key technologies will be discussed including dynamic movable portals, floating 3D windows, true 3D creation tools, live teleporting snapshots, and completely new concepts such as 3D portals.