In preparation for us thinking about an object and communication model for the new system, I've been starting to catalog "visual object environments" that have interesting takes on questions such as:

 - what is an object
 - how do objects influence other objects
 - how are processes associated with objects

The category labels here are somewhat arbitrary.  It's mostly the things near the top-left that are the seeds, with the rest kind of serving as pointers to tangentially-relevant pockets of ideas.  

Please feel free to write additions on the whiteboard.  (They might transmute into icons automatically.)  We're not trying to be exhaustive so much as identify "interesting possible influences".

Papers related to many of these systems are on the table in front of the whiteboard.