Julian Lombardi is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply collaborative virtual learning environments.
Lombardi's early research program centered on the evolution of complex organismal function in vertebrates and the evolution of maternal-embryonic physiological relationships. An advocate of the use of imaging technologies and early adopter of information technology in university teaching and learning, in 1987 Lombardi began writing HyperTalk-based software applications in support of learning and instruction in anatomy and physiology. In the mid-1990s, Lombardi combined his interests in information technology, complex systems, and the phenomenon of emergence in biological systems to begin designing and developing computer-supported collaboration systems involving self-optimizing massively multiuser online 3D environments.
In 1989 he developed and marketed The Bone Box, a commercial 3D auto-tutorial program for use in learning human skeletal anatomy with the early Macintosh computer.
ViOS
Lombardi eventually founded ViOS, Inc. where, during the period from 1999 to 2001, he served as the venture capital-backed company's first CEO and then chief creative officer/software architect. There, he and his team designed and implemented ViOS, a client–server technology that enabled the first 3D user interface to network deliverable resources in the form of a highly customizable and massively multi-user online virtual environment – essentially a very large scale social software system/3D wiki.
Croquet Project
Lombardi is one of the six principal architects of the Croquet software developer's toolkit and from 2006 to 2008 he served as executive director of the Croquet Consortium, a not-for-profit organization to promote the adoption of Croquetopen source software technologies.
Lombardi led a National Science Foundation funded effort to develop Open Cobalt, an open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application and toolset to support the large scale visualization and simulation needs of educators and researchers. Open Cobalt is being made available in the open source as a way of fostering a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of research and education.
2004. "Design for an extensible Croquet-based framework to deliver a persistent, unified, massively multi-user, and self-organizing virtual environment". With Mark P. McCahill. In: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing. Edited by Y. Kambayashi, K. Tanaka, and K. Rose.
2005. "Annotation authoring in 3D collaborative virtual environments". With others. In: 15th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence .
2006. "3D model annotation from multiple viewpoints for Croquet". With others. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing, Edited by K. Tanaka, and K. Rose. IEEE.
2010. "". With Marilyn Lombardi. In: Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. Edited by W. S. Bainbridge. Springer-Verlag, New York, NY. 318 pp.
Patents:
Lombardi, J. 1999. — Systems, methods, and computer program products for accessing, leasing, relocating, constructing and modifying internet sites within a multi-dimensional virtual reality environment
