Douglas Engelbart posited that collaboration and better organization of tools and learning are key to augmenting human intelligence. This idea resonates with Einstein’s quote: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Together, these ideas point to the notion that computer systems should help people collaborate more effectively to solve larger problems that cannot be tackled by a single person alone.

Additionally, we consider a program to be the executable description of an idea, which unleashes the power of the computer as a dynamic medium.

The author’s group has been working on various interactive and collaborative software development environments based on these ideas. These include:

• Parks PDA: An early electronic theme park guide developed at Disney Imagineering R&D.
• Squeak Etoys: An end-user authoring tool featuring block-based programming.
• Shadama: An interactive particle programming system with dynamic code translation to GLSL and GPU code.
• STEPS Frank: A GUI framework described in an extremely concise form.
• Croquet Greenlight and Croquet Microverse: Real-time collaboration systems in 2D and 3D with live programming capabilities.
• Local AI UI framework: An interactively programmable UI system that integrates AI agents.

In this talk, the author will present these environments and the ideas behind them.

Yoshiki Ohshima has research interests in interactive and educational computer systems, software architectures and programming languages. Yoshiki graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1994. He was awarded his PhD for the creation of “Kedama”, a massively parallel particle programming system, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2006. Yoshiki worked on theme park related research project at Walt Disney Imagineering R&D from 2000 through 2002. In 2002, he joined Twin Sun, Inc. From 2007 he worked at the Viewpoints Research Institute. At VPRI, Yoshiki worked on projects include bringing the Etoys environment to children via the “XO” and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, multilingualization of software environments, and the STEPS project.

At SAP CDG Labs and Y Combinator Research, he worked on a few end-user programming languages, including GP and Shadama.

He founded Croquet Studios with his colleagues and currently developing network-based OS and a user environment.