"We won't be holding the T-shirt hurling contest at JavaOne this
year. I should have done all of the prep and announcements a couple
of months ago, but I was out sick and mostly unconscious... it's
become clear that the time is too short and life is way too hectic
for me to do it properly."
James Gosling, father of the Java programming language
Although James Gosling's words brought disappointment to the Java
developer community, some folks weren't about admit the demise of
this long-standing JavaOne conference tradition.
If they couldn't hurl real T-shirts, they said, let them hurl virtual
ones.
And so began what may become a new Conference tradition: the
fiendishly clever Virtual Flying Dukes competition.
The steps were clear:
- Create, obtain, or assemble an avatar (possible sources were provided).
- Solve a simple physics problem to determine where the shirt will land.
- Write jMonkeyEngine (jME) code to move your avatar to that spot.
- Optional: Animate the win or loss.
John Wetherill and Kevin McDonnell of Sun Microsystems joined forces
with Joshua Slack of gaming-centric jME to design the developer
contest. The contest site at the JavaOne Pavilion hosted 10 Ubuntu
workstations with the necessary software, which those who signed up
for the competition could use to work on and finish their projects.
Wetherill, McDonnell, and Slack will unveil the specifics at their
Friday technical session, "Behind the Virtual Flying Dukes Developer
Contest" (TS-1550). It explains the six lines of jME code that begin
the project and provide the window, scene graph, camera, lights,
input system, and navigation -- pan, zoom, and orbit.
Where did the 3-D world come from? Conference attendees who visited
the Project Wonderland booth can see the influences of this
open-source project. It creates 3-D virtual worlds, customized to support
distributed collaboration and built on Project Looking Glass and
Project DarkStar technology.
Meanwhile, booth staffers noted that at least one contestant stayed
up all Tuesday night in his hotel room to work on his entry. The
first prize of $5,000 would purchase a lot of stuffed Dukes and beer,
after all, not to mention the glory of being the First Ever Winner.
On Thursday, the contest sponsors selected these five individuals as
the top entrants to solve the physics problem and animate both a
hurler and a receptacle to accurately catch the shirt:
- Daniel Freeman
- Loren Anderson
- Robert Chou
- John Sirois
- Michael Riecken
Then, at the After Dark bash, between rounds of BattleBots and the
sounds of MiniKiss, the audience Applause-o-Meter will determine the most
imaginative, funny, and realistic of the entries. Check the Virtual Flying Dukes web site or java.sun.com to view the winners.
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