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Yoshiki Ohshima - Croquet Microverse - 26 April 2023

For this month's online presentation, Yoshiki Ohshima will demonstrate the Croquet Microverse, which is a 3D collaborative construction environment. It is an incarnation of Smalltalk-based Croquet but instead implemented in JavaScript. Microverse allows a group of users to collaboratively create new objects in a virtual space, and describe their behaviors in the live programming manner that can be used by professional programmers.

The object extension mechanism used in the Microverse is heavily influenced by past class and object extension mechanisms, many of which originated from experimentation and implementation in Smalltalk. Likewise, the architecture of the Microverse application framework draws upon other frameworks such as Morphic and AppKit. Yoshiki will explain the connections between those systems and the Microverse.

Yoshiki joined Walt Disney Imagineering R&D in 2000 as an intern while attending the graduate school of Tokyo Institute of Technology, and helped develop prototypes of Disney's theme park attractions. He also has been involved in Alan Kay's research group, and participated in the research and development effort of education programming environment Squeak Etoys and later took the leading role. Yoshiki has worked at the Viewpoints Research Institute, SAP Labs CDG, and Y Combinator Research, all of which Dr. Kay founded or helped found. He was awarded his PhD. for designing and implementing a massively parallel particle programming system from Tokyo Institute of Technology.

This will be an online meeting from home.

If you'd like to join us, please sign up in advance on the meeting's Meetup page to receive the meeting details.

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