Alice is the result of about 10 years of research and development at the University of Virginia and Carnegie Mellon. To truly appreciate the design concepts and project genesis, read the doctoral dissertation by Matthew Conway and 'Alice in a Squeak Wonderland' by Jeff Pierce.
Alice is a superb addition to Squeak.
Would the author of the following step forward?
There is a serious design flaw in the lighting or rather the shading. It is too bad otherwise it is a good start, but quite unusable.
The NeXTStep 3DKit was the only intelligent 3D system ever created. OpenGL is design by idiots. I hope the BMRT now exluna.com and their shader programming language, that is of a pixar or .rib file design, gets ported to Apple's OS neXt Server platform (if enough people request it). Apple's Multi-CPU Velocity Engine Super Personal Computers Networked together will make virtual raytracing a reality and put all the past ten to twenty years of non-traced 3D imaging development to shame as an obsolete waste of time. Further if 50% of the 'People of Earth' learn to be programmers, then as Alan Kay says 'A computer revolution will occur', until then computers seem to use people instead of the other way around. The key to the future is in making 4D systems, meaning integration of physics into 3D. This Alice thing is good, only because it is built on SmallTalk.
God help us create the (RIB shader language) 3DKit/4DKit again.
