E15 is a research project.

Imagine an internet where you (not the site designer) were able to decide how to view and experience web content.

Imagine an internet where web servers didn't just give you a static chunk of html, css, and javascript, but exactly the content you asked for.

Imagine navigating an internet where the content maintained a degree of spatial relevance.

E15 is a platform that enables end users to experience this internet, an internet beyond the browser.

Luis Blackaller, Kyle Buza, Kate Hollenbach, and Takashi Okamoto, in the Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab.

At it's core, E15 is a dynamic texture engine.

E15 generates and manages textures (2D images in a 3D context). These textures can be either static (images, rendered web pages, text) or dynamic (procedurally generated 2D graphics using apple's Quartz2D API). An embedded Python interpreter is used to run scripts that generate these textures. The textures can then be sent through an image processing/filtering engine, which allows the cumulative application of custom image filters to the textures generated by the script. The result is a powerful 3D environment where both static and dynamic 2D content are easily generated and arranged.

E15 is the result of three months of intense programming and is evolving at an extremely rapid pace. While a widespread public release is still months away, we plan to distribute a few pre-alpha binaries in the near future to obtain user feedback.

Python is the embedded language of choice in E15 for three reasons. First, more people are familiar with Python than any other scripting language. Second, the Python community has produced a large number of extension modules that range from imaging to packet sniffing libraries, and can be used by E15 developers for almost any purpose. Finally, we have found many of the dynamic qualities of Python (metaclass instance tracking, for example) to be beneficial for a truly interactive graphics programming environment.

Currently, E15 runs on MacOS X. As it is currently a research project, we have no plans to port it to different operating systems. As momentum increases, however, this is likely to change.