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.
Cobalt is an emerging multi-institutional community software development effort to deploy an open source production-grade metaverse browser/toolkit application built using the Croquet SDK. Cobalt was made available under the Croquet license as a pre-alpha.
Open Croquet Collaborative Immersive Environment
What if….we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could we go? What kinds of decisions would we make that we might have been unable to even consider 20 or 30 years ago, when the current set of operating systems were first created? …we could collaborate with one another in an online dimension to create or simulate anything we wanted to? …we had the robustness of a 3D immersive technology, the diversity of the Internet, and the degree of social interaction we have in the real world?
Croquet is a combination of open source computer software and network architecture that supports deep collaboration and resource sharing among large numbers of users. Such collaboration is carried out within the context of a large-scale distributed information system. The software and architecture define a framework for delivering a scalable, persistent, and extensible interface to network delivered resources. The integrated 2D and 3D Croquet interface allows for co-creativity, knowledge sharing, and deep social presence among large numbers of people. Within Croquet’s 3D wide-area environments, participants enjoy synchronous telepresence with one another. Moreover, users enjoy secure, shared access to Internet and other network-deliverable information resources, as well as the ability to design complex spaces individually or while working with others. Every visualization and simulation within Croquet is a collaborative object, as Croquet is fully modifiable at all times. Users and groups of users can author and publish their individual resources within a persistent 3D knowledge architecture. They may build any number of private or shared “worlds” instantaneously, making them immediately accessible for others to explore by providing spatial portals. These portals function much like hyperlinks do within the World Wide Web. But unlike the Web, Croquet enables the user to find and get to other individual worlds through the larger context of Croquet’s persistent common spaces. Croquet is also a complete development and delivery platform. Its infinitely scalable architecture provides it with enormous possibilities as an operating system for both local and global informational resources.
we’ve been waiting for that convergence of the Internet, 3D games, and peer-to-peer networking. For many, Second Life represents that convergence—and our collective future online. But there is a problem.(…)
Second Life will never scale because its designers embraced the computing hardware and software status quo. The architecture we currently enjoy was designed in large part for two-dimensional computing. Adding another dimension requires tremendous processing and bandwidth resources—resources that will start to cause bottlenecks in the hierarchical structure of the Web itself. (…)
Our human ability to handle information in tidy 2D hierarchies is pretty good, but it pales compared to our capacity to negotiate in the 3D environments we evolved in.(…)
Croquet is thoroughly peer-to-peer in both its application and its architecture. So it is not vulnerable to the limitations of hierarchy - either conceptually, or technically. It is a platform for networking just about everything. (…) Croquet is built on a “virtual machine”, which means it transcends the boundaries of both operating system and geography alike, like some encoded blueprint for the space-time continuum.
Max Borders is a TCS contributing editor and writer living in Cary, NC. He blogs here.
Articulo completo: Why Second Life Won’t Get a Third - TCS Daily
Why Second Life Won’t Get a Third - TCS Daily
EduTechie.com » Blog Archive » 7 Ways Croquet is Better than Second Life
This Virtual Life: The Future of the Internet is not Secondlife
SecondLife Concerns | D’Arcy Norman dot net
Julian Lombardi’s Blog: How Croquet is Different
Alphaville Herald : Secret Linden Tapes Show Philip Blowing Gasket
Manual para crear islas en croquet. Basic Croquet-Cobalt Island Creator Manual - Croquet Consortium .
Esta claro que el diseño grafico no es lo de esta gente.
