DreamScape Design Philosophy

By Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs

• Constructive Experience.
  Open ended set of tools, rules, and resources that you can use together in creative ways, resulting in both predictable and unexpected behaviors.
• Nurturing Environment.
  As opposed to a Killer App. Provide creative people with fertile ground in which to plant their seeds.
• Dynamic Extensibility.
  Author new rooms and parts on a regular basis, that people can plug together and dynamically load at run time.
• Distributed Multimedia Publishing.
  Distribute suites of plug-in rooms and parts on-line, by using KMP as a WWW Helper Application. Distribute bulky media on CDROM or via FTP, that is referred to by light weight up-to-date plug-in parts published regularly on Web servers.
• Transparent User Interface.
  Content is more important than control panels.
• Direct Manipulation.
  Graphical representation, intuitive response to input, modeless, continuous feedback.
• Multithreaded Animation.
  Everything on the screen is happening at once. You don't have to click, stop, and wait for an animation to finish before doing something else.
• Gestural Interaction.
  Directional pie menu "flicking" gesture for moving between rooms, connecting and disconnecting maps. Throwing gesture to move objects around dynamically. Painting tools effected by gestures. Butterfly and robot apply gestures to the parts they're holding, in the same way you do when you drag them around.
• Navigation Metaphor.
  Consistent two way links, maintained by the editable map view, so you can remember your way around. The map editor interface makes it easy to build topologically flat maps, but still allows you to make tangled un-geographic "hyperspace" links.
• Simulation Metaphor.
  Continuous physical processes like motion, gravity, and friction are simulated, so the number of states the system can be in is virtually infinite. Spatial navigation without simulation only has as many possible states as spaces ("you are here").
• Deconstructionist Interface Model.
  Object oriented design techniques deeply effect the very nature of the interactive experience. Whatever that means.
• Users and Agents on Common Ground.
  You can interact directly with simulated agents, because you're both part of the same environment. The butterfly can pick flowers and paint with them, as easily as you can. The painting tools respond to the gestures of whoever's holding them, human, butterfly, robot, or any cyborganic combination! You can even pick up a waving robot arm, grab the fluttering butterfly with it, shake her around, and paint with the flower she's holding! The flower, or whatever the butterfly has ahold of, will respond to the combined gestures of you, the robot arm, and the butterfly! Fortunately, she can't pick you up and paint with whatever you're holding -- that would be taking it too far.
• Plug-In Authoring Tools.
  Dynamically loaded map window lets you jump around and edit room connections. Dynamically loaded sets of painting tools with themes, that draw in interesting and appropriate ways, in response to gesture.
• Director as ScriptX Authoring Tool.
  Leverage off of ScriptX's Director Importer Toolkit, so artists can use Director for what it's good at, assembling animations and positioning registration points, then easily import their artwork into ScriptX, without programming. So it's easy to make all kinds of animated parts with sound effects and moving registration points, and painting tools that scatter images around like the "Image Hose" in Painter, that all plug together in wonderful ways.
• Finder as ScriptX Authoring Tool.
  Leverage off of the capabilities of the Finder and File Manager as much as possible. People know how to use the Finder, and it's very good for certain tasks, like naming and organizing directories, source and media files. Organize projects in directories and files, which work across all platforms, instead of storing source code and media in some special database format. ScriptX build scripts automatically process everything in certain directories, so you can just put your stuff into place and run a script, without programming.
• ScriptX as Web Authoring Tool.
  Coming soon: "Save as HTML"! Check out the ScriptX Web Module Documentation.