David Alan Smith (born 1957, in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina) is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and CTO of the Croquet Corporation. He has focused on interactive 3D and using 3D as a basis for new user environments and entertainment for over twenty years.
He began his programming life as a corporate analyst at Thermo Electron Corporation, where he worked to develop an enterprise-wide multi-user multidimensional hierarchical spreadsheet program in the APL programming language. In 1982, Smith went to work for Richard Greenblatt and Lucia Vaina as a programmer for Softrobotics, an affiliate of Lisp Machines, Inc. where he worked to develop an expert system for the diagnosis of brain damage using an Apple II as the front end to a Lisp Machine. In 1984, he moved back to the Special Projects Laboratory at Thermo Electron to work for Stelianos Pezaris (Sutherland-Pezaris headmount and Pezaris Array Multiplier), where he designed a process control application and helped to design a multiprocessor distributed controller architecture for a robotic PC plating system.
Smith then moved to the Thomas Lord Research Center in 1986 as a staff scientist working on intelligent object manipulation using robotic tactile sensors, pneumo-elastic and mechanical hands. There he developed a telepresence system using stereo-optics and a dataglove controlling a Puma-560 robot equipped with the pneumo-elastic hand.
Smith has been nominated by the Lockheed Martin to be one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty Speakers who will speak about his work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010. [1]
In 1987, Smith created The Colony, the very first 3D interactive game and precursor to today's first-person shooters. The game was developed for the Apple Macintosh and soon won the "Best Adventure Game of the Year" award from MacWorld Magazine. In 1989, Smith used the technologies developed for the game to create a virtual set and virtual camera system that was used by James Cameron for the movie The Abyss . Based upon this experience, Smith founded Virtus Corporation in 1990, and developed Virtus Walkthrough, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers. Smith also co-founded several other companies including Red Storm Entertainment with Tom Clancy, Timeline Computer Entertainment with Michael Crichton, and Neomar, a wireless enterprise infrastructure company.
Smith was one of six principal architects of the Croquet Project (along with Alan Kay, Julian Lombardi, Andreas Raab, David P. Reed, and Mark P. McCahill). Development of the Croquet Project moved to the Open Cobalt project in 2009. He was co-founder Teleplace, Inc. (formerly Qwaq) which was focused on developing Croquet technology into a solution for the enterprise. Teleplace ceased operations in 2011. [2]
In 2018, Smith founded the Croquet corporation with other engineers from the project. In 2020, the company raised a seed round, [3] branding its main product, Croquet OS, as "the Operating System for the Open Metaverse".
Smith worked at Wearality Corporation on the Virtual World Framework. He is the co-founder of a machine learning company called Tanjo.ai.
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation. In many applications, GUIs are used instead of text-based UIs, which are based on typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard.
Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations. Despite being modest in number Lisp machines commercially pioneered many now-commonplace technologies, including effective garbage collection, laser printing, windowing systems, computer mice, high-resolution bit-mapped raster graphics, computer graphic rendering, and networking innovations such as Chaosnet. Several firms built and sold Lisp machines in the 1980s: Symbolics, Lisp Machines Incorporated, Texas Instruments, and Xerox. The operating systems were written in Lisp Machine Lisp, Interlisp (Xerox), and later partly in Common Lisp.
Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon. Logo is not an acronym: the name was coined by Feurzeig while he was at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and derives from the Greek logos, meaning word or thought.
Symbolics, Inc., was a privately held American computer manufacturer that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.
Descent is a first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Productions in 1995 for MS-DOS, and later for Macintosh, PlayStation, and RISC OS. It popularized a subgenre of FPS games employing six degrees of freedom and was the first FPS to feature entirely true-3D graphics. The player is cast as a mercenary hired to eliminate the threat of a mysterious extraterrestrial computer virus infecting off-world mining robots. In a series of mines throughout the Solar System, the protagonist pilots a spaceship and must locate and destroy the mine's power reactor and escape before being caught in the mine's self-destruction, defeating opposing robots along the way. Players can play online and compete in either deathmatches or cooperate to take on the robots.
In computing, a visual programming language, also known as diagrammatic programming, graphical programming or block coding, is a programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually. A VPL allows programming with visual expressions, spatial arrangements of text and graphic symbols, used either as elements of syntax or secondary notation. For example, many VPLs are based on the idea of "boxes and arrows", where boxes or other screen objects are treated as entities, connected by arrows, lines or arcs which represent relations. VPLs are generally the basis of Low-code development platforms.
Mixed reality (MR) is a term used to describe the merging of a real-world environment and a computer-generated one. Physical and virtual objects may co-exist in mixed reality environments and interact in real time.
The Croquet Project is a software project that was intended to promote the continued development of the Croquet open-source software development kit to create and deliver collaborative multi-user online applications. Croquet is implemented in Squeak Smalltalk.
A wired glove is an input device for human–computer interaction worn like a glove.
Julian Lombardi is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply collaborative virtual learning environments.
Previsualization is the visualizing of scenes or sequences in a movie before filming. It is a concept used in other creative arts, including animation, performing arts, video game design, and still photography. Previsualization typically describes techniques like storyboarding, which uses hand-drawn or digitally-assisted sketches to plan or conceptualize movie scenes.
VirtuSphere is a spherical virtual reality device. It consists of a 10-foot hollow sphere, which is placed on a special platform that allows the sphere to rotate freely in any direction according to the user’s steps. It works with computer based simulations and virtual worlds, and rotates as the user walks, allowing for an unlimited plane upon which the user can walk. A wireless head-mounted display with gyroscopes is used to both track the user's head movement as well as display the environment of the virtual world. VirtuSphere can serve many purposes, including exercise, video gaming, military training, and virtual museum tours.
Interactive skeleton-driven simulation is a scientific computer simulation technique used to approximate realistic physical deformations of dynamic bodies in real-time. It involves using elastic dynamics and mathematical optimizations to decide the body-shapes during motion and interaction with forces. It has various applications within realistic simulations for medicine, 3D computer animation and virtual reality.
CRS Robotics Corporation was a robotics company based out of Burlington, Ontario, Canada. CRS Robotics designed, manufactured, distributed, and serviced human scale articulated robots, and laboratory automation systems. Human scale robots have approximately the same reach, speed, the range of motion, the degree of articulation and lifting capacity as a human being and are designed specifically to perform tasks that are hazardous, highly repetitive or generally unsuited for humans. Laboratory Automation applications are used to speed the effort of drug discovery for pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers.
Computer graphics deals with by generating images and art with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.
Open Cobalt is a free and open-source software platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual worlds both on local area networks or across the Internet, with no need for centralized servers.
Tony Parisi, one of the early pioneers in virtual reality and the metaverse, is an entrepreneur, inventor and developer of 3D computer software. The co-creator of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), he has written books and papers on the future of technology. He works on WebGL and WebVR and has written two books on the former, and an introductory book on virtual reality programming. He is the chief strategy officer at Lamina1. Parisi is also a musician, composer and producer working on multiple projects.
OpenQwaq is open source computer software for immersive collaboration, which enables organizations to implement online 3D virtual world workspaces for their specific needs. OpenQwaq is based on the Teleplace technology, a conferencing platform that has been in the market since 2007, with the name Qwaq Forums until 2009.
N-World is a 3D graphics package developed by Nichimen Graphics in the 1990s, for Silicon Graphics and Windows NT workstations. Intended primarily for video game content creation, it has polygon modeling tools, 2D and 3D paint, scripting, color reduction, and exporters for several popular game consoles.