A way to bring 3D to the next level will be to make 3D authoring fundamentally more accessible to end users. Imagine, if 3D authoring would be so simple that kids without any modeling and programming background could make their own 3D games and run them in browsers. Unfortunately, the 3D authoring tools that we have are mostly aimed at professional 3D creators. These are great tools but have typically steep learning curves. What we need are Casual 3D Authoring tools. We have explored new ideas of casual 3D authoring and have found that is many cases it can be just as simple if not simpler to have kids make 3D than 2D. As part of the Scalable Game Design project we are running a study with over 10,000 (mostly) middle school students learning about computer science through game design. We have started to use AgentCubes, our Casual 3D Authoring tool, to see if students are motivated and capable to make 3D games. The answer is yes and yes. Look for the 3D games built by students here: http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/arcade/

This shows how the tools are used but we have also a 100% Web-based version. And, yes, there are free versions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GWcb3aG2w0

true but the EU appears to be going back in time ;-)

The EU is apparently having too much time making up problems. Just about EVERY appliance in a kitchen is more dangerous than a MacPro. Have you every used a kitchen mixer? Rotating blades hooked up to a high power motor, no protection, no case... We have a number of MacPros. You really have to open up the case and want to stick your finger in there. Even if you would, these motors are low power. The potential injury would be minimal compared to a mixer. This makes no sense. Is the European Union turning into Fire Marshall Bill?

... to get supercool authoring. As part of AgentCubes, a 3D creativity tool supporting Casual 3D design, we have created a new kind of a 3D authoring tool. Casual 3D, similarly to Voxel or Minecraft is not aimed at Pixar animators but at people who have not done any 3D authoring before and would not want to spend more than a minute to get started. Imagine combining Inflatable Icons with Voxel. One could build some pretty cool worlds and program them. You can see an early draft of a short demo video below. I am guessing that AgentCubes may be using similar technology as Voxel. Every game/simulation is turned into a HTML5/WebGL version using the Three.js game engine.

draft of AgentCubes video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85CMrbvIYc8&feature=youtu.be

The programming built in to AgentCubes is accessible even to young kinds. You can see and run some samples here (the WebGL part is still alpha). The 2D games are Java, the 3D ones are in Javascript and WebGL: http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/arcade/

If you are ready to have the students move on from making simple animations in Scratch perhaps to making games in 2D and 3D you may want to check out AgentCubes http://www.agentsheets.com/agentcubes/ Like BYOB, you can make your own methods, use recursion, etc.

ps: what kind of class was this? Is this an after school program? Were the students self selected?

I have a couple of more references that I could dig up again but here is one about generating Sokoban levels: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=646964.759857 Notice the year: 1996. This is a little dated.

Working on some joint research I visited the main LEGO Billund Denmark site years before the big crisis. As part of a tour I was shown an enshrined list of commandments created by the founders. This list captured the fundamental philosophy of good, creative toys. I remember being deeply impressed with the foresight of the founders. But I also remember that there was a rule that was explicitly against the idea of LEGO ever to create human like characters that would resemble true or fictional characters from popular culture. The idea was that the characters should remain generic and in the eye of the kid playing with it could turn into anything, anybody they wanted to. Fast forward to the current situation with LEGO licensing tons of characters from Lucas Art and others. Now LEGO is saved because it give they kids the Darth Vader etc. characters “they want”.

There are many ways to think about this. I’d say acting directly against the explicit philosophy of your founders is definitely a sell out. On the other hand, what choice did they have? I wonder if the list of commandments is still on public display in Denmark or if it got moved into some dark drawer. Does anybody have a copy?

I completely agree. All the mission critical parts are NOT Lego.

How could the need to support many different hw/sw requirements be possibly an advantage? Testing alone becomes a nightmare. The percentage of users running the latest, unmodified, i.e., Google version, of version of Android is really small. As a developer you would have to emulate just about all these high and low end platforms. Good luck with that.

Probability of failure: I like the idea of OSS but if one thinks of it as a software development approach/methodology/philosophy, or whatever you want to call it, and would look at the big picture of success and failure cases one would have to draw a pretty bleak conclusion. It does not seem to work very well on average! Yes, every proponent of OSS will produce a nice list of some impressive OSS projects and certainly Android could be considered THE poster child of OSS. But for each successful OSS project there are 10,000 dead or semi dead ones. Imagine any other field with these odds. Imagine for instance bridge design. If only one out of 10,000 bridges designed and implemented would be actually used or usable, that would be terrible.

Innovation: Also, take that 10 most successful OSS project list and remove all the items that are OSS projects that are highly inspired by non OSS products predating them (e.g., Lunix/Unix, Gimp/Photoshop, OpenOffice/Office, Android/iOS, ... ). I am not necessarily against these kinds of projects but it is really hard to consider them innovative. Now what are you left with? The answer is not much.

As an approach OSS has not worked well on average and nothing has really changed over the years. There is no real trend here. The fact that there are some, very few, truly successful, OSS projects now could simple be the result of the fact that there are just MORE OSS projects. In other words, the average chance of an OSS to have really impact has not improved at all. This is simply a number game with no qualitative shift of any kind. Also, lets not kid ourselves. Most end users really care about the FREE part of FOSS and not the fact that they could access or change the source. They want Foss not fOSS.

Are the successful projects successful because of OSS or in spite of it? The answer to that is less clear that is should be. As a user, for instance, I may or may not like Linux for desktop. The fact that it is free is completely irrelevant to me because I value my time. If Windows or OSX works more efficiently for me just a little bit I will not hesitate one second to buy either one. However, and more importantly, as a developer, the idea of developing a product for an OS that already is a niche product (which would be ok) but then split into however many distros makes Linux a non starter. I have no interest nor the capacity to track all these versions. The more conceptual question is if there is an intrinsic force to OSS that makes it more likely to fork into different versions compared to their commercial versions. As far as I can tell the answer is yes. For developers and end users this is ultimately not a great thing. Even OSS projects with good control, e.g., Android, are becoming fragmented in ways that are gradually turning into a problem for developers and ultimately for end users.

and the surprising result: air + petrol = petrol

from the friendly people who pioneered educational drag and drop programming (AgentSheets) comes AgentCubes, the first 3D creativity tool integrating the creation and programming of 3D shapes with advanced end-user development tools.

Watch this movie and tell me if you think this could have been done with any other tool (in 3 minutes) http://youtu.be/jgiGoLYFA0A

Have a look at video included in this ACM article describing the use of AgentSheets and AgentCubes as part of the Scalable Game Design project: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/5/148567-programming-goes-back-to-school/fulltext You can see other 9 years olds.

tablet + keyboard = laptop