Powering the future of the Internet with new ways to define our shared digital reality | Mozilla Blog

Now more than ever, we need a movement to ensure the Internet remains a force for good. The Mozilla Internet Ecosystem Program (MIECO) advance this movement by supporting those seeking to develop a more people-centered Internet. This week we’re introducing Yoshiki Ohshima, a computer scientist and researcher with big ideas about how to change the way we think about building virtual worlds.

Software has always had the power to shape the world around us, but the advent of spatial computing – driven by the Internet of Things (IOT), virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and access to cloud computing technology offers – is creating those world-changing possibilities in a slightly more literal sense. The development of the “immersive web” brings new possibilities to the Internet that allow us to interact with information and each other in new interactive ways – in some cases, taking us into completely new worlds. completely new that cannot be experienced in our physical world. With such powerful new capabilities, new ways of building these experiences are needed, and Yoshiki Ohshima has spent years thinking about new programming paradigms.

Yoshiki, who began his career at Walt Disney Imagineering, is now chief scientist and co-founder of Croquet, an organization building foundational technologies for future generations of communication and collaboration tools. hybrid. With more than two decades of experience working at the forefront of collaborative technology, Yoshiki has been helping realize the promise of technology that helps us create and connect with others from the ground up.

Yoshiki’s work at Croquet focuses on real-time synchronization applications designed to provide new ways of collaboration. Greenlight, which combines whiteboard and screen sharing functionality with voice and video chat, provides a shared workspace for team communication and brainstorming. Croquet Microverse is another application that provides new ways to share information with multi-user virtual worlds.

Although 3D virtual worlds are not new, advances in computer graphics have made them increasingly popular over the past few years. Through his work at MIECO, Yoshiki hopes to expand access to tools that help people shape the virtual environments around them in natural, intuitive ways.

“The unique feature of Croquet Microverse is that it allows developers and designers to work together in real time to create and improve content directly from within a 3D environment – ​​and one can This can be done for complex programs, not just a small subset of features,” Yoshiki said.

Creating new ways to define behavior in software beyond text-based programming languages ​​is something Yoshiki has been working on for many years. By bringing visual, block-based programming into a 3D environment, he saw an opportunity to improve our ability to collaborate to co-create virtual worlds.

Today, virtual worlds are being applied to a variety of use cases, made possible by innovations and changes in the way we think about the world of programming. It’s now easier to build rich educational experiences that explore the inside of the brain or embed presentations and informational content into a shared world accessible from the browser. ever. Croquet, which provides synchronization and simulation technology to make it easier to build multi-user applications, is an ideal testing ground for 3D programming.

In the 3D world that Croquet offers, Yoshiki explains that his vision of collaborative, block-based programming will give visitors capabilities that will allow them to modify the digital world they inhabit. living. Croquet’s underlying “reflection” system allows the simulation to be perfectly synchronized for everyone in the environment, which means changes one person makes are instantly seen by everyone else. . These capabilities, built on principles found in other visual programming projects that Yoshiki has influenced, such as GP Blocks, open up the field of interactive programming for virtual worlds to a wide audience. more impressive.

As the field of programming continues to evolve, Yoshiki sees a future that bridges different skill sets to help people build together more collaboratively.

“We are well-positioned to create a programming environment that is generally powerful yet easy to use,” said Yoshiki. “An object created in one Croquet Microverse world is fully transportable to another world, and we hope to standardize the format for broader adoption by other platforms as well.”