On January 12th, it was announced at The Boston Media-Grid Summit that the Immersive Education Initiative has selected Croquet as one of three official “next generation” immersive education platforms. The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia companies, and foundations that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. The Initiative will now direct both funding and programming resources towards the development and deployment of open source Croquet technologies and open source Croquet-based educational applications. Selection criteria for this important honor included the following: 1) support for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems; 2) availability as open source code; 3) vendor-neutral client and server architectures (no vendor lock-in); 4) stable and reliable runtime implementations; 5) integrated text chat and voice chat; 6) high resolution graphics; 7) multi-user support for collaboration; 8) highly customizable avatars that support high resolution graphics and body animation (gestures); and 9) support for user-created content. The other two immersive education platforms selected were Sun’s open source Project Wonderland client and the now open source Second Life client.
Los métodos inmersivos de realidad virtual se ligan a un ambiente tridimensional creado por un ordenador, el cual se manipula a través de cascos, guantes u otros dispositivos que capturan la posición y rotación de diferentes partes del cuerpo humano. La realidad virtual no inmersiva también utiliza el ordenador y se vale de medios como el que actualmente nos ofrece Internet, en el cual podemos interactuar en tiempo real con diferentes personas en espacios y ambientes que en realidad no existen sin la necesidad de dispositivos adicionales al ordenador.
The Future of the Internet is not Secondlife
Secondlife isn’t the promised-land of some post-human immersive reality. It isn’t going to become the replacement for the Internet.(…)
Scripters will have a hay-day with Croquet — the entire system is built on Squeak; a derivative of Smalltalk. The best part is that scripters with the right permissions can even re-write or modify the system code that the world is running on without restarting the server or recompiling. My favorite part so far however is probably the most important feature of all — hyperlinks.
“Worlds,” in Croquet are individual entities. They are self-contained like a box. You can run one on your local machine and mess with the source code, import objects, and experiment away. If you have a network of computers, you can a world on each one and network them together. This is where Croquet gets really fun — you can create “portals” to other worlds. They look like something out of a sci-fi movie: like windows with another world on the other side. The other world is of course rendered in real-time and you can even manipulate objects through the window (assuming you have the appropriate permissions of course). It’s really an eye-catcher… and stunning since some of the latest games are only beginning to start using this and Croquet is already implementing it in a networked P2P system. So these portals are just like 3D hyperlinks to other worlds.
What is really going to make Croquet the real deal when it comes to the future of the Internet is that it’s basically an operating system. With an embedded virtual machine, it can run on its own hardware or on top of any operating system. It can interface with applications on the host machine and users can share those applications collaboratively even if that application wasn’t programmed to do so. You can already pull up a mozilla browser or an x-terminal in a Croquet window and share it in 3D. You can stream any media and some developers have already integrated VOIP clients. The single biggest reason why Croquet will become the future operating system is that the users can run and modify the code that the worlds are built on and they can integrate their own applications.
Try doing that with a proprietary system like Secondlife.
The Internet is open. Not closed. Croquet, IMO, is the future.
Articulo completo: This Virtual Life: The Future of the Internet is not Secondlife
