Projects
Operating System
Develop a 'semantic human interface' - a general purpose web-operating system that acts in more intuitive ways than is presently available with existing modern software.
This human-interface consists of a 3D scenegraph that renders widgets and audiovisual multimedia content. In 2D/3D vector space, absolute measurements (ex: pixels) are irrelevant. Geometric objects are freely positioned, sized, and rotated relative to each other.
- fractal geometric arrangements
- large amounts of detail
- high-frequency video-game interactivity
- animation
- physics simulation
- visual effects
The particular ways of generating these emergent GUI spaces is arbitrary, though, for simplicity, most activity occurs in embedded 2D planes (with subtle Z-layering), emulating conventional windowed GUI's with common widgets like buttons, sliders, and resizable windows. Another control available with this setup is zooming into and out of sub-spaces, which can be arranged to take advantage of this control.
Rather than separating computer activity into individual software applications, functionality tends to directly involve the fundamental objects and operations about which one is truly concerned about, in present moment-to-moment contexts.
- all forms of communication
- multimedia authoring and arrangement
- software development
- information navigation
- backwards-compatibility with existing protocols and interfaces
Data is structured as a graph-based semantic memory (nets), supporting explicit and dynamically-implicit hyperlinks amongst objects and the possible operations upon them. This supports navigation through memory and its metadata in ways that imitate the human mind's associative attentional flow. Parts of memory can be network synchronized in real-time with remote instances, supporting forms of distributed communication
The prototype developed in Java uses completely LGPL-compatible open-source supporting libraries, making possible similar licensing for the assembled system also. Java is helpful for cross-platforming and the availability of libraries which can be connected as plugins.
Considered as a general purpose operating system (OS), the system can be placed at the window-manager layer of a POSIX (Unix) stack, meaning it can be packaged as a self-contained bootable Linux-based OS.