alt Hacker NewsI made a housefly simulator on the Mac once, using a visual programming language called Bounce / Body Electric, developed by Chuck Blanchard at VPL Research, originally used for VR simulations with the DataGlove and Eyephone and a pair of SGI workstations to render each eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research
The simulated fly's purpose was to annoy the simulations of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson by landing on their heads, who were watching TV and arguing about the closed caption stream. I wrote to Jaron Lanier about it 27 years ago:
At 12:31 AM -0400 7/8/99, Hopkins, Don wrote:
Hi, Jaron. We've met briefly once or twice - I'm a friend of David
Levitt's.
What's this about Sun acquiring the rights to the VPL patents, and
Body Electric?
https://web.archive.org/web/20051217153424/http://www.advanc...
>VPL had problems maintaining quality in our hardware- though I still sometimes find our headmounts and gloves in use. But our software was really great and can still offer a lot. A challenge to VRML people: Don't you DARE turn out more VR tools that aren't at least as good as this old stuff!
Does Sun actually have the Body Electric source code? What version do
they have?
Does anybody at Sun even know how to compile a Mac program?
Last time I worked there (admittedly a long time ago), they were too
embarrassed to allow Macs in the building (which might make somebody
realize how bad Unix sucks in comparison).
Has anyone tried to rewrite it in Java?
When I was working with David at Levity and Interval, I totally
overhauled the source code to Bounce: porting it to the latest version
of CodeWarrior and the PowerPC, cleaning up C code translated from
Pascal, that no human had ever touched before, and just generally
re-indenting and adding white space so it was pretty to look at.
Then I implemented a new interface for plugging in DM's, based on
ActiveX (yes, ActiveX runs on the Mac). I added a new data type that
you can flow along blue wires: a COM object (aka a plug-in ActiveX
object in a shared library).
Then we made plug-ins modules that produced and consumed the new
plug-in data types, like strings and polymorphic dictionaries. With
these new data types, we were able to model very complex simulations
as nested trees of dictionaries, strings and numbers, treat
dictionaries as high level objects, pass them all around on wires,
reading and modifying them at will.
The thing that the original Body Electric was missing is a way to
dynamically model structured data like Lisp s-expressions and
association lists, which is now possible in Bounce, using
dictionaries. (The swivel3d trees just don't cut it for representing
"knowledge".)
Bounce still had the "M4" Director player rendering engine, but it
didn't do everything we needed, so I implemented my own graphics
library for drawing sprites, playing sounds, and stuff like that. We
used it to implement a simulation of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Jackson
watching TV and arguing over the closed captioning stream.
A big fat housefly would skitter around the screen, land on their
faces, and tickle them into waving their hands around and
pontificating.
I just got a 400 mhz G3 powerbook, and fired up a 2 year old copy of
Bounce and the crazy Limbaugh/Jackson demo, and it still works,
actually like a bat out of hell! I ran into David and John Szinger
(another Bounce programmer from Interval) a few days ago at a 4th of
July party, and they really got a kick out of seeing the old demo that
we worked together on, still running!
I live in Oakland just south of Berkeley. Drop me a line if you're in
the bay area, and would like to see what Bounce has evolved into.
-Don
From: Jaron Lanier
To: Don Hopkins
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 1999 6:13 AM
Subject: Re: Body Electric lives?
Hey there, and thanks for writing!
Yup, Sun owns VPL and Body Electric, and my guess is that if anyone
looked very closely it would turn out Interval doesn't have rights to
Bounce. But no one is likely to look very closely, so let's forget
about that. (I don't think Sun is aware of Bounce or the work at
Interval.)
I had never asked what was done with Bounce at Interval- it's
fascinating to hear what you were up to. I live in NYC for the most
part, but I'd love to see it sometime when I'm in the Bay Area. Also
Chuck Blanchard lives in SF and you and he might want to trade demos
sometime.
There IS a community of Body Electric users. It is STILL building the
most interactive 3D virtual worlds of any tool (though Alice, from
Carnegie Mellon, is the other hot contender). That's SHAMEFUL! While
BE sucks in every other way, all the more recent vr design tools,
especially the vrml ones, simply avoid the problem of deep
interactivity. How could the community be so whimpy, at this late
date?
On the Body Electric side of things, there has also been some work
updating to CodeWarrior/PowerPC (shame we didn't share that work!), as
well as support for Quickdraw3D, OpenGL on the Mac, OMS, and some
other standards.
There have been some changes to the interface, but not as ambitious as
yours. The neatest thing is a debugger/tracer tool that is a pleasure
to use. Since BE is used mostly in 3D domain, there are also some
tools dealing with textures, lights, etc.
I had always thought the swivel tree was ridiculous, of course, but on
the other hand I liked the idea that the virtual world and the
knowledge base were the same thing- that unity encourages the
visibility and grabbability of the underlying concepts. I think the
brain works that way- there isn't some barrier behind which everything
gets abstract- instead, it's user interface all the way to the bottom!
What I think would be the coolest long-term destination of BE would be
extending the scenegraph so that it was as powerful a knowledge base
as you'd want...
I'd LOVE to see a fancy BE release, in JAVA, or at least spitting JAVA
out. The question, of course, is where the money would come from.
I've tried to talk Sun into an open source release so the community
could hack on it voluntarily (the source was included in the patents
that were granted, so it's actually already released by the US
government anyway, though only on paper). Unfortunately, Sun doesn't
want to do that. What they've said instead is that I can choose up to
six sites with free hacking privileges at a given time. Bizarre!
With so few sites, I think there'd need to be money to make sure the
sites stayed focused on it... You'd have thought Sun would know
better by now.
The body electric community is surprisingly NOT entertainment
oriented, though I and a few others still use it that way. There are
people hidden away who are still using it for ergonomic simulations,
simple surgical planners (because the fancy systems are too rigid to
model some situations), cognitive test rigs, and some work with kids.
You should know there was some tension about BE/Bounce at one point.
The problem was that Chuck Blanchard wasn't credited as the lead
designer/programmer of BE/Bounce when David brought the program to
Interval. Chuck's name was reduced in stature in the "about" and he
was not mentioned in some important semi-public demos at Interval. He
was also offered a pseudo-position to help with Bounce at Interval,
but without health benefits - and Chuck has MS and absolutely NEEDS
health insurance. I at one point yelled at the guy who runs Interval
(forgot his name..) about their treatment of Chuck- and David is
STILL mad at me for making a fuss about it. But I felt I had to.
So that's the scoop! Both sides of the mystery revealed!
All the best,
Jaron
https://web.archive.org/web/20050212085044/http://www.advanc...
Here are three goals for "good VR" from David Levitt, with whom I work at Pantomime Corporation, and who used to work on VR at VPL: