Croquet
From uvvy
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project
Croquet website: http://www.croquetconsortium.org/
Croquet SDK notebook (work in progress)
The promising new open source, P2P virtual reality technology Croquet is emerging from research laboratories as a "Metaverse Operating System" and a candidate open standard technology platform for future implementations of virtual worlds. The beta version of the Croquet Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.0 was released on April 21, 2006.
The available screenshots of Open Croquet, such as the one above, are rather primitive from a computer graphics point of view. However, this is not surprising as the Croquet development team's efforts have so far been focused on building a platform rather than on the creation of impressive graphical content. The system has all features needed to generate and navigate visually impressive VR scenes, and now that content creators are beginning to work with the SDK they will soon produce VR worlds of a high visual quality in Croquet.
Croquet is open source in the sense that everyone can download and use the source code (not in the sense that the software development process is open source: on the contrary, the software development process is "owned" and tightly managed by a relatively small project team, which includes many recognized software experts and specialists such as the vell known software engineering "visionary" Alan Kay.
The Open Croquet software is written in the development environment Squeak, an extended implementation of the Smalltalk language which is itself available as open source software. Though Squeak is not as popular as some other software development environments, Croquet team members believe it has unique features and is a powerful enabling technology for an ambitious project such as Croquet.
The objectives of the Croquet project are very ambitious: to give everyone the possibility to create shared and linkable 3D virtual worlds available to all users on a LAN or the Internet. Users in a virtual worlds can jump to other virtual worlds by stepping through "portals". This is the VR equivalent of hyperlinking web pages, and shows how the concept of navigating through a set of linked documents can be transferred to VR. Croquet includes voice communication in shared worlds and in-world web browsing. It will permit importing content created with external 3D design systems such as 3D Studio Max. After the launch of the beta SDK, an important question is when the Croquet system will be fully operational.
As soon as it reaches full operational stability and performance, the Croquet system may well take the 3D web by storm as one of the best development platforms for computer videogames, architectural simulation, multiuser persistent virtual worlds,distance education, and even security and military applications.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Croquet Project is an open source technology that can be used to create networked 3D environments for collaborative work. The Squeak-based programming environment serves as a foundation for Croquet. While its primary target is in the educational area it is conceived from the start as a series of shared worlds which can be created in other public and private domains where advanced collaborative software is needed".
From the Croquet FAQ: "The Croquet project is an effort to develop a new open source computer operating system built from the ground up to enable deep collaboration between teams of users. To do this, the project seeks to define and develop a system is focused on the simulation and communication of complex ideas. We call this "communication enhancement" - the direct extension of the abilities of humans to develop, understand, and describe even the most complex simulations. Croquet enables this communication by acting as the equivalent of a broadband conferencing system built on top of a 3D user interface and a peer-to-peer network architecture".
