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Croquet – Blowing Holes in Castle Walls

Thu, Apr 12, 2007

prise_de_la_bastillepost.jpgediting_rabbitpost.jpg

“Croquet was built to answer a simple question, ‘If we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could we go?’”

So, in simple terms, Croquet is a new operating system with a virtual 3D world as the human interface to the OS. The latter is is what most obviously separates it from all its predecessors, MS Dos, Windows, Vista, Linux, Unix, Apple OS’s etc, etc. But, there is probably a lot more to be revealed about Croquet in its less visible layers.

The Croquet Consortium (an open source software foundation) with some industry and many academic members gives this description of Croquet.

Croquet is a powerful open source software development environment for the creation and large-scale distributed deployment of multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses that are (1) persistent (2) deeply collaborative, (3) interconnected and (4) interoperable.

But, the programming guide that you get when you download the recently released Croquet SDK v 1.0 (available at Croquet) doesn’t mince words or hide behind technical jargon. They write:

The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way to control the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would declare himself as King. This was great for the King. And not too bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end – technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides of the castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology enables this.

The pictures at the top of this post are Prise de la Bastille, by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel (left) and an avatar editing a text document in a Croquet world (right). There are some interesting screenshots at the Consortium site, including one of an avatar editing a conventional blog inworld.

I think I might have hung back while the developers brought Croquet along a little more, if I hadn’t seen this “storm the castle” manifesto. But, that got my attention. And, I have decided to try to become an embedded reporter for the start of the siege, watching in the field as the first fire balls get lobbed over the castle walls.

Most of the work on Croquet is still in academia, at the moment. But as Croquet SDK v 1.o is now out, I will try to launch a WAN site – a croquet world on the WAN accessible to anyone else running Croquet. I have an experienced developer and systems engineer friend on board to help! And, one of Croquet’s key premises is users and developers will be able to interact naturally and collaboratively.

So far I have found it is easy to download Croquet and run it locally or on a LAN. But, getting Croquet running on a WAN is another matter. Croquet is currently working on some of the performance and other issues. But, they say it is now doable. And, they have done it. And, there’s a picture to prove it!

There are also a number of interesting Croquet projects show-cased on the site. And, 3pointD, recently reported on, “Teledildonics Coming To Croquet,” a project not listed by the Consortium.

The connection between the development of virtual worlds and positive global development is one of the main themes of Ugotrade. This coupled with a look at how people use technology in innovative and unexpected ways in new environments. There are not many non academics or non corporate developers using Croquet yet (and may not be for a while). But, I couldn’t resist looking into the storming the castle metaphor. And, with a blog on crossing digital divides, probably I shouldn’t.

chickenworld.jpg

Here is my first screenshot. The chicken (me) is meeting the teradactyl (my developer friend) for the first time. He just came through that portal and we are figuring out the user interface and voice chat (which sounded like speaking on a noisy jet – not sure if this is my problem or Croquet’s). The navigation rocks though. Moving around is easy, and motion control is precise.

I decided against being Alice in Wonderland – one of the other available avatar options. Wearing Alice just seemed too pretentious for me. And, I don’t want to spend time learning how to import a cool avatar from Second Life, which apparently you can do. There is no-one here yet to admire the artistry.

Croquet is a lonely, culturally barren world, at the moment, and absolutely no comparison to the excitement and social richness of Second Life. But, lets see where a portal on a WAN leads. The Croquet SDK v 1.o intro says it designed to be used only by experienced developers, at the moment. So what am I doing in Croquet? Not sure yet. But, I will certainly report on what I find, and if I see any castles under siege.

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categories: Virtual Worlds, Web3.D
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1 Comments For This Post

  1. Les H Says:

    The two response links go to Sportzia, not to any comment.
    Anyway, this is good. I have Croquet loaded and am beginning the journey to learn how it is programmed and works on Red Hat Fedora Core 6.

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