thinman@netcom.com (Lance Norskog) (04/22/91)
Hello- The following 4 articles are my preliminary design for a windowing system and associated programming language for melding real-time 3D, sound, force feedback, and networking. It's intended as a VR/Cyberspace building block, and as a drop-in replacement for traditional WIMP interfaces. (See the Byte Feb. 1991 article on Xerox PARC's Information Visualizer.) In general, I stole basic concepts from various computer science areas and mashed them together. The system and language are called '5D': 3D graphics + Time, The Fourth Dimension + sound and kinetic inputs counted as one dimension. 5D is a simulation system for describing VR scenes and the real-time interaction available to the user. This posting has been delayed for a few months because I finally learned about the object-oriented paradigm, and decided to add OO to 5D. 5D is essentially a dataflow specification language using object-oriented rule-rewriting. The first and second articles are the introduction, general overview, an in-depth technical review, speculations on an implementation for a uniprocessor + frame buffer architecture, and general thoughts on a pleasant software development environment. The third article details the built-in primitive classes available to 5D authors. The fourth article includes sample bits of code, which will probably illuminate various puzzling sections of the text. I would like anyone who can decipher this document to mail me their impressions, criticisms, and wish lists. In particular, experienced parallel and object-oriented software folks are heartily to critique those somewhat unformed aspects of 5D. Thanks, Lance Norskog thinman@netcom.com