Copyright and Patents [3]

1. Copyright
2. 27 September 2000 and build 384
3. 10 July 2001 and build 401
4. 13 December 2001 meaning and action
5. 3 February 2002 4D interface and 4D space

In describing the software we publish from this Web site we use terms like "state of the art" and "obvious". The following references are intended to help place our software within the broad sweep of 3D computing and help flesh out the meaning of these terms:

AMIGAMAGIC oBLITTERator [1987] [http://www.owonder.com/amigamagic]

Elements of a Three-dimensional Graphical User Interface [1997]

[13 May 2002 update start]
In 1993 the film Jurassic Park showed off the Silicon Graphics FSN (pronounced "fusion") 3D file system navigator for their IRIX operating system, which presents an interactive navigable 3D view of your computer resources. The film is reviewed by James Berardinelli at http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/j/jurassic.html. FSN in the film is described at http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeImages/Film/JPark and SGI present FSN at http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html.
[13 May 2002 update end]

With the release of ROOMS build 401 we need to add to the abstract description of our software which was started above [see September 2000].

As with the publication of September 2000 [see above] what follows is merely a defensive statement.

On EVAC:
Entities recognised by the product may be agents, capable of originating actions or commands or instructions or be sources of data, and in all or any of these ways act as agents in response to conditions which are preset or conditions which develop (change) over time or conditions which are entirely new and have to be dealt with in an unprescribed or novel way. Such agents may act on objects within or accessd via the product. Entities may or may not be part of the product or of a particular instance of the product. Entities or the ability to create entities or enhance entity capability may be components which may optionally be incorporated into the product or optionally work in conjunction with the product.

The entities may modify their own behaviour according to conditions (states, commands, instructions or data) external or internal to themselves or in conjunction with other agents. Other agents need not be of the same kind (e.g. could be a user or an EVAC-bearing object or other, needing only to be able to effect minimal communication with the entity (e.g. a bit sent or received)). Modified behaviour may be learned or be novel and patterns of behaviour may may be sent to and received from external storage or other entities.

The entities may regulate the behaviour of visual objects or data objects or instruction-bearing objects or structural(systemic) objects or the properties of a location which other entities may at some time occupy or may inform the behaviour of other agents (like a user or an EVAC-bearing object or other entity, needing only to be able to effect minimal communication).

The entities may moderate the behaviour of visual objects or data objects or instruction-bearing objects and act to adjust, correct, reduce, enhance, accelerate, enable or disable other object behaviour. Such moderation may accomplish the naturalistic performance of a task (as in realistic simulation) or the necessary and safe regulation of a task (like moderation of an instruction to destroy named other resources with inappropriate wild-card naming).

The entities may take over control directly or indirectly and partially or entirely for some or all of a task or time span of the behaviour of another entity (the other entity may or may not be of a similar type) either as a more approriate instrument for performing (or instructing or providing data) the task or as a contribution to the behaviour of a system (of entities or of minimally communicating components of a system) or whether by necessity the entity can only act through a proxy due to its otherwise limited range of effective action or influence.

Entities may be virtual in so far as they have no fixed operational location, rather they are said to be located or operating wherever they derive the majority of their processing power (which may be best viewed or understood as substantially in software (e.g. if running on a virtual machine) or substantially hardware (e.g. if directly executing machine instructions)). The location may change or be distributed in response to available resources or most suitable resources or proximity to resources required for effective entity behaviour. One mechanism for achieving virtual entities is product support for entity shell creation and facilitating shell loading and unloading as in the transmission and modification of patterns of behaviour. A shell may be for example an inactive or behaviourless entity (e.g. the product responds to a request to create (or supply) a shell and the shell is given a load behaviour instruction and once loaded, virtual entity activity is effectively moved to the environment of the product which supplied the new shell).