Julian Lombardi's Blog

Open Cobalt at Milla Digital

2010-07-20T15:21:00.004-04:00

Milla Digital is hosting a virtual world construction workshop from June 29th-July 3rd at the Centro de Historia in Zaragoza, Spain. The workshop will focus on the use of Open Cobalt as a tool for developing and deploying P2P-based virtual worlds. Zaragosa's Milla Digital is an urban space designed to support creativity and innovation. It is sponsored in part by the Centro de Arte y Tecnología (CAT). Click here for more information about Milla Digital.

Open Cobalt at SIGGRAPH

2010-04-14T11:42:00.004-04:00

Saba Kawas from Jordan has been working on an Open Cobalt-related project for her Masters in Design at North Carolina State University. Her focus is on Animation and International Media. She recently presented a poster session at SigGraph on "hyper-learning interface developing navigation toolsets for virtual environments. Working with Open Cobalt, Saba's poster session discussed two core areas of her research: the design and development of a media explanation generator and the process of enabling contextualized hyper-linking Open Cobalt virtual exhibit spaces. This work has been published at the ACM Portal as part of Siggraph proceedings. It is great to see that, even before its alpha release, the Open Cobalt technology is starting to be used as a tool to enable such exploratory work with virtual worlds.

Stereo 3D in Open Cobalt!

2010-04-14T11:28:00.004-04:00

Nickolay Suslov has recently contributed code for a stereoscopic 3D anaglyph filter to the Open Cobalt contributions repository. These changes make it possible for the user to view images are made up of two color layers, superimposed, but offset with respect to each other to produce a depth effect. This will allow you to view Open Cobalt workspaces in stereoscopic 3D using red/cyan stereo glasses (anaglyph glasses).

Vivaty is Dead

2010-04-03T22:17:00.004-04:00

On March 31st, Vivaty announced that it will completely shut down its social virtual world operation on April 16th. Co-founder and CEO Jay Weber said that the company will give users "about 2 weeks for our creative users to take snapshots and videos of their awesomely decorated scenes — once things shut down, the 3D content will be gone". Too bad all those assets are not retrievable...

Like many other companies in this space, Vivaty planned to make money through an in-world currency. Jay Weber continues: “Vivaty.com is a rather expensive site to run, much more than a regular web site, and Vivaty the company has been running out of money for some time. Our business model was to earn money through Vivabux sales, but that has never come close to covering our costs. We tried for months to find a bigger partner that would support the site, but that didn’t work out.” He goes on to say that "we understand that some of you have recently bought Vivabux on the assumption that Vivaty.com would be around for some time, so we are going to issue refunds for Paypal purchases made since February 1, 2010. I’m sorry we can’t refund any transactions through Gambit offers, including cell phone purchases."

Vivaty's closure is the latest in a string of virtual world shutdowns that have included Lively, Forterra, Metaplace, Wonderland, and There.com. These are tough times for virtual world businesses that find it hard to generate adequate revenue in an online world where people have become accustomed to getting things for free.

GENI Collaboration on Open Cobalt

2010-04-01T09:16:00.008-04:00

The GENI Collaborative Interactive Infrastructure (GCii) is a prototype network operations center (NOC) being developed by RENCI Senior Research Scientist Chris Heermann and others at both RENCI and at Duke University. Based on Open Cobalt technology, GCii visually presents a research network and all of its components in a collaborative, real-time virtual space. This allows researchers, engineers, infrastructure providers and system administrators to come together in a virtual environment containing shared views of various resources so that they may manage and monitor both networking and distributed system resources. GCii is designed to make it easier for GENI experimenters to more easily and efficiently share network resource information across administrative domains using a set of common communication tools. This application is an excellent example of how the flexible Open Cobalt system can be used to support serious scientific research and collaboration.

No More There There

2010-03-03T10:13:00.009-05:00

There.com CEO Michael Wilson just announced that the company is pulling the plug on its website (There Central) and its seven year old 3D immersive virtual world simulation at 11:59 PM on March 9th. The platform was geared to a younger user demographic with entertainment as the core value proposition. Its cartoon-like virtual reality environment provided users with free access to a very entertaining and nicely implemented virtual world-based social network.

The virtual world product created revenue by leveraging an in-world economy driven by managing participant access to simulation capabilities. In other words, they would charge participants for virtual goods such as clothing, pets, houses, vehicles, mustaches, furniture etc. They even charged participants to take part in virtual events/activities such as paintball and racing matches. Those who paid for a premium membership, could develop and sell virtual goods to other participants. There were many tens of thousands of items for sale within the simulation - of which many were made available by premium member developers. There's whole economy was based on an in-world virtual world currency called Therebucks with one real dollar converting to about 1,800 Therebucks.

Unfortunately, the company announced that it will only provide full refunds for Therebucks purchased after Feb 1. Otherwise, as is the case with the collapse of any other economy, the Therebucks in the virtual hand of a basic participant will likely be worth virtually nothing after the 9th. The company is, however, providing a short-term currency buyback program for developers. It will be interesting to see how they manage this or if it causes a run on the virtual bank. Check out this posing from there's shutdown FAQ:

You can only redeem Therebucks you have made by selling developer items. Therebucks you have collected from Sparkles, Tips, or give trades from other members are not eligible.

Please do not attempt to game the system. It is not fair to There, and it is not fair to other members. Also, you will not be cheating There out of virtual currency, or virtual goods, you will be cheating us out of real money. Fraudulent transactions will not only put you at risk of permanent banning from There but may also qualify for escalation to law enforcement as well.

And what about all the in-world assets that many many participants thought they owned? Well, if you are a developer then all indications are that you'd better hurry up and get them. Again, from the FAQs:

If you wish recover the textures, catalog images and model files from your developer submissions, please send a request to recovermyassets@there.com. Please provide a list of Submission IDs of the material you wish to recover.

On the other hand, if you are a basic user who invested heavily in the trappings of There's virtual world, then you may be out of luck.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2010-02-05T18:28:00.004-05:00

Last week the virtual world community received some more bad new. With last week's finalization of Oracle's deal to buy Sun Microsystems, Oracle quickly pulled financial support for Sun's Project Wonderland. Wonderland was not an official product of Sun Microsystems, but rather a Java research/demonstration project that had gone fairly far in advancing a very capable open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D server-based virtual worlds.

Nicole Yankelovich, Principal Engineer at Sun Labs and Project Wonderland team leader did a remarkable job of advancing the Wonderland technology over the past few years. The present v 0.5 release is an elegant early implementation of a virtual world toolkit with integrated audio, application sharing, VoIP, and some very nice avatar developments. I am quite grateful to Nicole and her team for their deep commitment to advancing interoperability between virtual world platforms. Over the past year, members of the Open Cobalt and Wonderland development teams met on several occasions at Duke and elsewhere to advance a joint strategy to ensure interoperability between Project Wonderland and Open Cobalt virtual workspaces. It is a shame to learn of this setback since the project appeared to have so much momentum. In my experience, interoperability is something everyone seems to talk about and few actually act on. Nicole and her team were acting on it.

Oracle's move is not entirely unexpected since open source software is not something the company is known for promoting. I wonder what all this means for the future of Java...

Online Worlds Published

2010-01-21T20:09:00.004-05:00

I am pleased to announce a new book from Springer entitled Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual edited by William Sims Bainbridge. The collection of essays is published as part of the Human-Computer Interaction Series. It examines the phenomena of virtual worlds, using a range of theories and methodologies to discover the principles that are making virtual worlds increasingly popular, and which are establishing them as a major sector of human-centered computing (HCI).

Marilyn Lombardi and I wrote the ninth chapter entitled Opening the Metaverse. In it we discuss the need to establish an open metamedium that can support large-scale metaverse deployment. We also describe our research team’s current efforts to design and develop virtual world cyberinfrastructures informed by the successes of the Web and explore how the combination of peer-to-peer communications protocols, open software, and end-user empowerment to freely create and assemble content and functionality can set the conditions for emergence of a global metamedium for collaboration and interaction.

Better Cover Your Assets

2010-01-01T06:00:00.002-05:00

The closing down of Metaplace during this holiday season should serve as a clear reminder of how exposed you are to losing your virtual world assets when relying on a third party to host those assets. With Metaplace CEO Raph Koster's announcement on December 21st that his virtual world service would shut down on January 1st, it became clear that users would only have a few days during the holiday season to attempt recovery of their virtual assets from Metaplace. With tens of thousands of Metaplace worlds already constructed, thats going to sting a lot of people who didn't quite get to their email over the holiday.

I really liked Metaplace and used it as part of my virtual worlds course here at Duke last semester. I'm so relieved that the shutdown happened between semesters! I'm also relieved that I didn't invest much time in building Metaplace-based educational environments for my students (which I was seriously considering). The rapid fall of Metaplace really underscores that any effort to invest in a platform where content (or the organization of content) is stored on a third party's servers is a very risky proposition.

The same risk is there for the many educational institutions have invested heavily in the development of Second Life grid-based virtual worlds for education. The problem is not unique to Second Life though. Virtually all of the vendors out there offer such worlds. When assets are created within such worlds (as a lot of them are), then those assets tend to fall under the vendor's exclusive control. In the case of the Second Life grid, consider that educational institutions are not even permitted to back up the assets they create! When was the last time you relied on anything for your livelihood that was NOT backed up in some way that you could restore in relatively short order? Lets hope Second Life doesn't end up shutting down in the middle of an academic semester - or worse yet, the week before classes begin. Can you imagine the carnage?

On the other hand, some vendors (Linden Labs included) are now offering products for the enterprise that allow an organization to host virtual environments on its own servers. This way, even if the vendor does go out of business, an organization would - at least for a limited time - be able to deliver an unsupported version of the platform and content until a suitable alternative could be identified and implemented. Even then, intellectual property concerns around proprietary code in the defunct platform could make it difficult, if not impossible, to legally migrate content to the new platform - especially if open standards aren't fully supported.

GPGPU Test in Open Cobalt

2009-12-27T06:01:00.000-05:00

Video of a Lorenz Attractor GPGPU object being calculated within an Open Cobalt virtual world. GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) techniques leverage a computer's graphics processor (GPU) to perform calculations that in most applications are traditionally handled by the computer's main processor (CPU). User interface elements within the Open Cobalt world can be used to dynamically color, rotate and translate the object. This is a continuation of Matthew Chadwick's explorations into GPU-computed chaotic attractors of dynamical systems in virtual worlds. The results are visually impressive. What's even more impressive is that you can navigate through these clouds in real-time. It's good to see this being worked on within the Open Cobalt code base. Thank you Matthew!

Open Cobalt Alpha Trailer

2009-12-25T10:58:00.004-05:00

A demonstration video for the upcoming Open Cobalt 1.0 alpha release filmed entirely from within Open Cobalt. Happy holidays to all who have made our exciting project possible!

Metaplace Closing

2009-12-21T12:56:00.001-05:00

In a recent email to its subscribers, the web-based virtual world company Metaplace announced that it is closing down its virtual world service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59 pm Pacific Time. Here is an except from the email: "Over the last several years, we here at Metaplace have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a Web site and create a virtual world of their own. Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer (user-generated content) service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company." I wonder who might be next...

Seaside and Comet Control

2009-07-14T13:28:00.003-04:00

Nikolay Suslov has just made it possible for Seaside 2.9 and Comet to control replicated islands in Croquet/Cobalt. This means that multiple users can be allowed to interact with virtual world content using a web browser in real-time. Through this work, content within virtual worlds can be made to change based on inputs originating from devices such as laptop computers, netbooks, PDAs, and even cellphones - basically any device that runs a web browser. This is an important step in making the content and attributes of virtual spaces reflect the state of a web-based social network or the actions of those unable to deploy OpenGL-based virtual worlds.

For more info, go here.

Toward a Mobile University

2009-06-14T10:53:00.001-04:00

A nice article by Cara Bonnet on Apple's recent AcademiX 2009 conference at Duke University. The conference was one of four regional conferences focused on spurring change in teaching and scholarship. This was a very high quality conference that featured a number of very interesting speakers in the lovely setting of the Washington Duke Inn here in Durham, North Carolina. Apple's Scott Morris did an excellent job designing the conference's format to stimulate collaboration between colleagues, feature national and regional speakers, and showcase innovative uses of Apple technology in emerging digital learning environments.

A Beautiful Math

2009-06-07T10:20:00.002-04:00

A short film by Douglas Arnold and Johnathan Rogness of the University of Minnesota revealing the visual beauty of Moebius transformations in mathematics.

The video shows the four fundamental types of Moebius transformations (simple translations, dilations, rotations, inversions) and how complicated combinations of these transformations can be intuitively expressed in terms of the simple motion of a 3D sphere through which a light shines from a point source.

This is a beautiful and elegant example of how 3D visualizations can make something as complicated as combined Moebius transformations easier to understand and appreciate.

The full version is available here.

Reconstituted Worlds

2009-06-02T06:40:00.000-04:00

This new video from GreenbushTV shows how you can discover a previously saved Open Cobalt virtual world using an in-world Web browser and then take steps to create a 3D hyperlink to that world after loading it from a web directory.

The capability of saving and accessing Open Cobalt worlds by leveraging the existing Web means that now anyone can create any number of virtual worlds and then make those worlds available to anyone with access to directories on which Open Cobalt's .c3d files are stored. It also means that our project is beginning to leverage already deployed Web infrastructures to support the distribution of, and access to, deeply collaborative virtual spaces.

Demo of VNC in Open Cobalt

2009-05-28T10:18:00.001-04:00

Another fine demo of emerging Open Cobalt functionality from our friends at GreenbushTV!

Quantitative Searching

2009-05-24T09:49:00.000-04:00

Last March, Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame) announced the eponymous Wolfram|Alpha, a computational data engine based on natural language processing, a large library of algorithms and what he coined as a new kind of science approach to answering queries. According to Wolfram, Wolfram|Alpha is "a first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone." I happen to be quite fond of first steps in ambitious long-term projects.

You can get an idea of how Wolfram|Alpha works by exploring a set of provided examples. You can also track the project's progress through a blog. The project's goal is to make it possible for people to access essentially any kind of systematic factual knowledge. You can watch an informative screen cast of Wolfram|Alpha here.

The Wolfram|Alpha engine differs from traditional web search engines in that it doesn't just return a list of results based on a query, but instead it attempts to compute a set of quantitative answers by accessing its own internal knowledge base. This is pretty interesting stuff. However, I think it would be even more interesting, and incredibly more powerful, if Wolfram|Alpha could return informed answers based on a combination of its library of algorithms operating on the distributed resources of the web rather than only on an internal knowledge base. I guess we'll have to wait a bit longer for that.

Open Cobalt on SMARTboard

2009-05-22T10:56:00.000-04:00

This is a video of teachers and students easily creating and accessing original virtual world content using the rich capabilities of Open Cobalt technology on a SMARTboard. This work is being led by Rich White at the Southeast Kansas Educational Resources Center. Virtual worlds are only now starting to become a creative medium!

Open Source Virtual Worlds

2009-05-19T22:37:00.000-04:00

An interesting article about the SDForum's Open Source Virtual Worlds SIG event last thursday in Palo Alto where I was invited to speak about about Open Cobalt. Other invited speakers included the project leads of Sirikata and OpenSim.

The SDForum is a leading Silicon Valley not-for-profit organization providing unbiased information and insight to the technology community. For the past 23 years, the SDForum has provided a venue for engineers, executives, researchers, technology leaders, and venture capitalists to exchange information on emerging technologies and best practices.

Open Cobalt KMZ Importer

2009-02-15T08:50:00.000-05:00

The Open Cobalt KMZ importer in action in a video by Phua Khai Fong. This new feature is significant because it allows Open Cobalt to import .kmz files created in Google SketchUp. It even allows you to bring in content from Google's 3D Warehouse.

Progress for Pilgrims

2009-01-22T09:28:00.000-05:00

Last fall, this Open Cobalt environment was used as part of an experimental Thanksgiving lesson designed to engage first graders on the topics of Plymouth Rock & the Mayflower.

Collaborative CAD in Cobalt!

2008-12-11T06:50:00.000-05:00

Thanks again to the work of Aik-Siong Koh and his team, Cobalt now makes it possible for users to work in a deeply collaborative CAD environment. This video shows how two Cobalt users on separate computers can work with relatively sophisticated CAD capabilities over a LAN. This newly-implemented collaborative CAD capability in Cobalt opens up a wide range of possibilities for engineers and others at a distance to develop sophisticated simulations and architectures in Cobalt worlds. The ability to develop animated content within a full-featured virtual world CAD environment sets Cobalt apart from other virtual world technologies in a very significant way.

Robotic Arm in Cobalt

2008-12-10T07:33:00.000-05:00

Aik-Siong Koh and company have successfully implemented a robotic arm in Cobalt.

Lively is Dead

2008-11-28T08:32:00.000-05:00

A quick death for Google's short-lived lively. After much flurry around its July launch of Lively as a "20% completed" PC-only 3D social arena technology, Google has now announced that it will end the service in December. Part of the problem may have been that porn had quickly made its way in to environments that were designed to provide a younger demographic with a circa 1996 Alpha World-like social chat experience. Looks like those in need of virtual sex will need to be satisfied with Second Life's offerings (see here for an opinion). Google says "It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business." Okay, so I guess that porn is not a business they want to be in? What I find striking here is that a company with as much intellectual and financial capital as Google could not muster anything more than poorly implemented platform-constrained retread of technologies that have been around for the past twelve years. The lessons here are that money without vision is useless and that unrestricted public spaces tend to attract a certain type of public in both the real and virtual worlds.

Croquet Summer of Code

2008-11-26T11:35:00.000-05:00

Here is a nice write-up about Phua Khai Fong's experience on the Google’s Summer of Code (SoC) project that involved integrating freeCAD, a 3D CAD application with motion simulation in Croquet. Phua (on the left) is now working to integrate FreeCAD functionality into the basic Cobalt UI.

A Beautiful Mess

2008-11-25T19:49:00.000-05:00

Anad Agarawala demos his physics-enabled desktop metaphor.

VNC in Cobalt!

2008-11-22T08:16:00.000-05:00

Rajeev Lochan has just been successful in getting VNC to work within a shared Cobalt space! VNC is a graphical desktop sharing system which uses the RFB protocol to remotely control another computer. This is a big breakthrough for our open project. It means that a Cobalt-based VNC client can connect to a VNC server on any other operating system. Cobalt users will soon be able to view and interact with remote applications (including full featured web browsers) or even collaboratively access remote desktops within the Cobalt application. Because the VNC protocol can use a lot of bandwidth, we still have some optimization to deal with - but this progress is great to see. Thank you Rajeev!

Holy Smokes!

2008-11-20T10:59:00.000-05:00

Rich White's video of a KMZ model of the Vatican in Cobalt!

Wikitecture

2008-11-16T08:14:00.000-05:00

Virtual worlds make it possible for architecture to be constantly changed and modified in ways that are not possible/practical in the real world. With the advent of collaborative virtual world technologies, we now have a way for us to shape our buildings as we use them. In this video, Jon Brouchoud of The Arch blog discusses wikitecture in virtual worlds using Second Life as an example. Wikitecture in virtual spaces has the potential to liberate architects as well as the users of virtual world architectures from the design-then build-then hope that it works paradigm.

Sharing Cobalt Worlds

2008-11-14T19:48:00.000-05:00

A video guide on how you can share Cobalt worlds with others.

Instant Virtual Museum!

2008-11-13T10:19:00.000-05:00

Rich White at the Greenbush Labs has posted a video of the collaborative virtual museum that he was able to create in only 30 minutes using Cobalt and free content derived from Google's 3D warehouse. Enabling such rapid creation of free multi-user virtual spaces is exactly what the Cobalt project is seeking to support on a broad scale. What kind of world would you like to create?

Kids Using Cobalt!

2008-11-11T07:59:00.000-05:00

Here is the first of several videos from Rich White at the Southeast Kansas Educational Resources Center who recently completed a formal pilot/focus group using Edusim (a stripped down Cobalt) at the Greenbush Labs. The video shows 6th graders collaboratively building an "Eco City World", a "Rockets & Space World" and a "Cells, Organs, and Anatomy World". In this first focus group, the students were asked to create .obj files for import into Cobalt and then to begin using Cobalt navigation, connection tools, and TPainter a away of adding additional content to their worlds.

Hey there, Emily!

2008-11-02T06:33:00.000-05:00

Say hello to Emily. She's a pretty effective spokesperson for Image Metrics' high-quality facial animation software. Unlike with garden variety mocap, facial rig animation can be developed with no need for markers or special cameras. Instead, the Image Metrics technology uses proprietary software to analyze video and develop data that can then be used to drive any facial rig. The analysis is then retargeted to a CG facial model. The end result is an animation that is incredibly compelling.

This type of technology gives us a glimpse at where we may be going with regard to far more compelling animated avatars than we currently have within today's virtual worlds. Imagine CG Emily's face being superimposed on an avatar frame based on real-time webcam video analysis. Of course, for that to happen, we will need much faster video-camera enabled machines than we have at present. Lets hope that open software and Moore's law will get us there within the next several years.....

Head in the Clouds

2008-11-01T01:02:00.000-04:00

Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie recently announced that the company will be offering internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The platform is called Azure and will run Windows servers and the .Net framework in the cloud as a hosted, pay-as-you go service. It'll be part of what they're calling Live Services, and it'll run Live apps, .Net apps, SQL server, Sharepoint servers, and Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM. With these developments, it appears that Microsoft is trying to move in the direction of Amazon’s Web Services and cloud computing initiatives from other enterprise IT players, including everyone from IBM to RackSpace. It may also be that they are moving away from the OS-on-a-box model in favor of cloud services. The writing is on the wall for Microsoft. They need to innovate quickly. Vista is not what they thought it would be. Instead, its turning out to be a good reason for people and companies to switch to the MacOS. If Microsoft gets any traction with cloud services on a broad market basis, then we may be increasing the world's dependency on ubiquitous network connectivities (and active subscriptions) as a prerequisite for even the most basic of interactions with computers and other devices. Such a scenario has its dangers since users of such services will need to have 'network' available to do anything. I'm not sure that such a scenario would be in most people's best interest.

Multi-touch Cobalt

2008-10-27T15:56:00.000-04:00

This video shows the Cobalt metaverse browser being tested on a 13-foot by 5-foot multi-touch visualization wall equipped with six high-definition projectors located at the Renaissance Computing Institute engagement center at Duke University. The input drivers are being developed by Dr. Xunlei Wu so that users can directly manipulate high-resolution data using both hands and multiple fingers for a more natural and intuitive data exploration experience. In the video, Dr. Wu is using both gesture and touch to navigate through, and rearrange content between, two Cobalt virtual worlds.

The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization. For more, see www.renci.org.

Quick CAVE

2008-10-26T00:25:00.000-04:00

Here is a prototype of an interactive CAVE unit being developed by Rich White in Kansas. In March of next year, the kids at Greenbush will be building their own very simple CAVE unit to run Cobalt for an even more immersive and engaging experience than they had using by running Cobalt on an interactive whiteboard.

SketchUp to Cobalt!

2008-10-24T15:50:00.000-04:00

The importer being worked on by Phua Khai Fong and Aik-Siong Koh is working nicely now. This is a comparison between a model loaded in SketchUp with the same model loaded into Cobalt. There are still some problems with texturing as they are working on getting material properties to import correctly. Its great to see the progress. This functionality will hopefully be incorporated into the next build. Thank you for your contribution!

Immersive Workspaces

2008-10-21T18:37:00.000-04:00

Linden Lab has announced that its now going to be moving into the enterprise 3D collaboration space. It recently announced a new product called "Immersive Workspaces" which is basically an area in Second Life set aside for corporate meetings. That more secure area represents "a completely exclusive and secure experience, with no connectivity to the Second Life mainland." Their intent is to develop a complete collaboration experience for the enterprise. I guess that is Linden Lab's attempt to try and ensure that business meetings are not disrupted by griefers or by unwelcome barrages of flying penises. Looks like the enterprise virtual worlds space is getting a bit more crowded. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Another KMZ Import

2008-10-19T19:23:00.000-04:00

Another test of the new KMZ importer from Aik-Siong Koh. Note that the textures are mapping nicely onto the relatively complex model! Soon we will be able to import lots of content from Google's 3D Warehouse into Cobalt. That will be nice...

KMZ Importer!

2008-10-17T22:44:00.000-04:00

Aik-Siong Koh and his team have been successful in creating a KMZ file importer for Cobalt. Here is a screenshot from the first successful load of a rubber ducky with textures. This means that we will soon be able to import into Cobalt a wealth of 3D content from Google's 3D Warehouse. We will also be able to use the free version of SketchUp as a primary content creation tool. The importer will be included in an upcoming release. Stay tuned.

Amelia Project

2008-10-16T19:32:00.000-04:00

The Amelia Project is an effort by Portugese graduate student Filipe Santos to leverage Croquet/Cobalt as a way of helping young children to become empowered to collaborate, negotiate, and make decisions about the configuration of the real world spaces that they inhabit (playgrounds, classrooms, theatrical sets, etc.). The philosophy behind this project is to help enable a new culture of childhood in which children are more active participants in societal decision-making. Based out of Lisbon Portugal, the project takes its name from the primary school in Lisbon, Portugal, where the project originated. The video shows how the researchers are beginning to use Cobalt as a means of exploring the use of version control to help in managing various configuration proposals that are developed by the children who are proposing various configurations of a space. Using these versions, an instructor can help structure discussion and facilitate debate among the children.

50 Worlds in 7 Minutes

2008-09-27T10:08:00.000-04:00

We are in a period of rapid proliferation of virtual world applications. Here is a very nice compilation that is well worth the seven minute viewing time!

A Family Affair

2008-08-31T19:57:00.000-04:00

My dear cousin Joe was featured in one of this year's Apple iPod ads. Joe is a singer and dancer living in New York. In the ad, he's the guy with long hair who appears just after the bubble pops. He is also the guy near the end doing the arms-spread-and-head-back move. Enjoy.

Strangely Attractive

2008-07-16T08:09:00.000-04:00

Matthew Chadwick has been exploring the creation of GPU-computed chaotic attractors of dynamical systems using the Croquet SDK. The code he is using is based on David Faught's procedural textures code. In this implementation, the cube to the left defines a parameter space for controlling the system. Matthew says that the same code he is developing could also be used for other things like in-world physics simulations. Matthew will make all of this available for public release once the code is ready.

Better Avatars!

2008-07-13T16:32:00.000-04:00

Better avatars for Cobalt are almost ready! Here is a video showing an early test implementation of a motion-cycle enhanced avatar in Cobalt. Peter Moore has been doing a wonderful job with this and in getting the Ogre3D XML importer to work with models developed in Maya or exported from Blender. That means that we will all soon have at least two art paths for getting avatars and other animated meshes into Cobalt worlds. It'll also be great to finally retire the stilted Alice and Rabbit avatars. This particular video also provides a sneak peak at some of the texture and environmental/directional lighting work that I hope to have make its way into the next update of the Cobalt code-base.

Croquet GIS

2008-07-09T20:30:00.000-04:00

Hans Baveco of the Netherlands recently posted the first version of a Croquet Geographic Information System (GIS) package to the Croquet repository. This package will also be incorporated into the next Cobalt build. It adds the ability to import and visualize geographic data sets in the formats of ASCIIGRID, ESRI Shapefile, ARC\INFO TINS and geo-referenced images. Sample data for use with this package can be downloaded here.

Content Creation

2008-07-08T19:30:00.000-04:00

Here's another video clip produced by the folks out of Malaysia who are working to port freeCAD into Croquet/Cobalt. When completed, this work will establish a much needed in-world content creation tool for Cobalt. The clip shows how handles can be used to manipulate an object within a Croquet space. freeCAD is written in VisualWorks Smalltalk.

Croquet Simulation Work

2008-07-07T07:12:00.000-04:00

This new video by Willi Griephan of Bremen, Germany shows the operation of two Croquet simulation spaces that he created using the Croquet SDK. The first is a falling "Domino" simulation that leverages the Open Dynamics Engine for its physics. The second scene depicts swarm behavior in an aquarium simulation where two members of a swarm can pair, and by doing so, spawn new offspring. The Swarm algorithm that Willi used is described here by Craig W. Reynolds.

BOSC 2008

2008-07-04T08:20:00.000-04:00

I’ve been invited to present a keynote address at the 9th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) in Toronto, Canada on July 18th. This event is one of several Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings occurring in conjunction with the 16th annual Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology Conference (ISMB 2008) and is sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community. The main themes of this year’s BOSC are around emerging technologies and hard problems in bioinformatics. These include infrastructure and data modeling, collaborative technologies, workflows, visualization, and best practices of software design and engineering.

My keynote is entitled “Croquet: An Open Collaboration Architecture for Scientific Visualization and Simulation”. I plan to discuss how virtual contexts can support the collaborative activities involved in the “doing of science”. I will also demonstrate the NSF-sponsored Cobalt application and how it is being developed to support collaboration, scientific visualization, and provide a much-needed infrastructure for the process of data access and software development at a distance.

Virtual World Winter?

2008-06-21T06:47:00.000-04:00

Bruce Damer, a guest blogger on TerraNova suggests that we may already be seeing the early sign of a Virtual Worlds downturn that may lead to a "winter" as severe as the one in the period 2000-2003. In his column, he poses eight provocative questions including one that asks: "Are open source efforts the inevitable shape of things to come (ie, creating standardized protocol layers which would lower the cost of entry and operation of the whole VW ecosystem) or simply an expression of frustration with or fear of the long term prospects of commercial platforms?" Perhaps the question should really be: "Are open source efforts the inevitable shape of things to come (ie, creating standardized protocol layers which would lower the cost of entry and operation of the whole VW ecosystem) and an expression of frustration with or fear of the long term prospects of commercial platforms?" In that case, the answer would most certainly be yes.

Cobalt Updated!

2008-06-09T17:42:00.000-04:00

John Dougan and Mark McCahill just announced the 2008-06-08 pre-alpha release of Cobalt that's downloadable here. Here's whats new in this release:

• Cobalt can now punch through the NAT firewalls.

• Cobalt now has an OpenAL null device class that will be used if the OpenAL libraries are not installed or if they have a startup problem (special thanks to Mike Klein for this code).

• Hitting the Esc key while the mouse is over the menubar no longer causes the menubar to disappear.

• A patch to make embedded applications work is now integrated into Cobalt.

• "Message not understood" no longer thrown when closing the 3D Painter tool in Cobalt.

• Cobalt's harness classes and their support are partially refactored.

• A race on quitting was removed by carefully timing the Tweak shutdown relative to the morph delete.

• Various packaging clean-ups were done.

• Minor fixes to the ASE import around some of the texture name handling code and more logging to aid in future fixes.

• New code to import a new mesh collection for the avatar (switch avatar functionality) has been updated to handle ASEs as well as the obsolete MDL format.

NSF SGER

2008-06-08T07:40:00.000-04:00

I've just been awarded an NSF Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to advance exploratory work towards a more complete open source Croquet-based browser application and toolset that can support the large scale needs of the scientific community. With this support, we will be helping to advance the Cobalt effort by 1) making general improvements to the user interface which includes the more complete buildout of Cobalt's menus as well as improvements to basic navigational control, 2) fully implementing and testing of the ability for end-users to tag and electronically store their Cobalt-created worlds to online directories, 3) designing and implementing methods for finding and contacting other users of Croquet spaces by leveraging XMPP/Jabber as a presence registration and rendezvous mechanism, and 4) designing and implementing of methods that enable Cobalt users to browse a directory of all registered and active Cobalt spaces and to make it possible for users to contact current participants of those spaces by leveraging XMPP/Jabber and institutional IAA infrastructures as a means of defining user permissions by group affiliations. At the end of this, we hope to have a full Beta of the Cobalt application available for download to all.

Moyers at NCMR 2008

2008-06-07T19:19:00.000-04:00

Here is a video of legendary journalist Bill Moyers who this morning electrified an audience of more than 3,500 at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis as he declared the media reform movement and Net Neutrality to be the most significant citizens' movements to emerge in this new century. "The fate of the cyber commons is up for grabs here," he said. "We'll lose that fight without you because the only antidote to the power of money in Washington is the power of organized people at the netroots." Moyers asserts that what we need to know to make democracy work is compromised by dominant media institutions that are becoming more deeply embedded in the politics of our society, and whose interests are more about manufacturing profitable consumer commodities than they are about helping fulfill the social compact. Interestingly provocative and well worth the 40 min runtime.

Turning the Cog

2008-06-07T06:49:00.000-04:00

Qwaq Inc. has recently engaged Eliot Miranda (a deeply experienced developer of Smalltalk-based VM implementations) to write a fast Croquet VM for release under the open source Croquet license. Named Cog, this VM will dynamically compile Smalltalk bytecodes to machine code and execute this machine code instead of interpreting bytecode. All of this will be transparent to the programmer and should execute pure Smalltalk code 10 to 20 times faster than the current Squeak VM used by Croquet. With planned further optimization, the new Croquet VM should significantly exceed the Smalltalk-based VisualWorks VM performance. Eliot expects to release the first fast version within a year and has set up a blog so that you can follow his progress.

MS-OLPC?

2008-05-16T08:08:00.000-04:00

Nicholas Negroponte just posted the following announcement:

"One Laptop per Child is announcing an agreement with Microsoft
to make a dual boot, Linux/Windows, version of the XO laptop. In addition, our intention is to engage one or more third parties to port Sugar to run on Windows in order to reach a wider installed base of laptops. In the meanwhile, OLPC remains fully committed to our goal: a completely free and open learning platform for the world's children. The mission statement of OLPC has not changed in three years.

Sugar is the first user interface specifically designed for children and teachers to learn and collaborate, and remains central to our strategy. Broadening Sugar's reach to as many children as possible remains key to OLPC's mission.

To enable the Sugar environment to reach as many children as possible, particularly in the poorest areas of the world, OLPC must be able to bid on educational technology contracts, some of which require that Microsoft Windows be able to run on our hardware. The increased volumes will lower the XO-1's price, already lowest in the industry with capabilities no other laptop shares.

OLPC is substantially increasing its engineering resources and all software development continues entirely on GNU/Linux. We will continue to work to make Sugar on Linux the best possible platform for education and to invest in our expanding Linux deployments in Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and elsewhere.

No OLPC resources are going to porting Sugar to Microsoft Windows, although as a free software project, we encourage others to do so. The Sugar user interface is already available for Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions, greatly broadening Sugar's reach to the millions of existing Linux systems. We continue to solicit help from the free software community in these efforts. Additionally, the Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu software environments run on the XO-1, adding support for tens of thousands of free software applications.

Open Firmware V2, the free and open source BIOS, is now capable of running Linux, Microsoft Windows XP and other operating systems, and was developed by Firmworks with support from OLPC. This will enable dual boot of OLPC XO laptops with Microsoft Windows XP in addition to the existing Fedora-based system and will become the standard BIOS/bootloader for all XO systems when completed. With this "free BIOS," the XO-1 continues to be the most open laptop hardware currently
available."

For more information, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/AnnounceFAQ.

Machinimascope

2008-05-01T19:59:00.000-04:00

Gamecaster is a new company that has developed a way to let you shoot 3D animation as if it were live action. This specialized capture technology called the Cybercam S3 was developed for use during broadcasts of video game competitions for sports games like Madden football and numerous combat titles. Using this device, camera operators are able to smoothly pan, tilt, truck, crane, and even zoom the camera lens within 3D virtual worlds in realtime.

Machinima 101

2008-04-30T22:29:00.000-04:00

An introductory lesson about the video production technique known as machinima. The lesson was filmed entirely on location within the virtual world of San Andreas and was nominated for a Machinima Award at the 2007 Bitfilm Festival.

Googley Eye

2008-04-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

Not that far from the truth.

Another Digital Rainout

2008-04-25T21:05:00.000-04:00

Today, for the second time in as many weeks, Second Life became unavailable for the same reasons that 3rd party large-scale server-based architectures should not be relied on to support mission-critical virtual worlds in any serious way. The outage happened, once again, just at the time that Aaron Walsh of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative was trying to host a Second Life in-world meeting. Here is what Linden Lab had to say: Logins have temporarily been restricted to staff-only as Operations addresses a slowdown in the asset system. We’ve also broadcast a request in world for residents who are currently logged in to refrain from manipulating or transferring assets. We’ll have more info ASAP. Obviously, this company is in real trouble given the frequency of these problems in a system that so many have come to rely on....

More freeCAD in Croquet

2008-04-22T17:46:00.000-04:00

A video of additional features being added to the freeCAD port to Croquet. This work is being done by Aik-Siong Koh and his students at Malaysia's Multimedia University. A tree view menu (to the left of the screen) presents a list of all the objects in the space and a specialized tool bar (to the right of the screen) allows objects to be scaled and rotated. Once the code for these features is cleaned up a bit more in the next weeks, it will be incorporated into Cobalt as enhanced functionality.

FreeCAD in Croquet

2008-04-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

Aik-Siong Koh and other Malaysian programmers are developing an in-world 3D modeling tool for Croquet. As a first step, they are porting freeCAD into Croquet. freeCAD is a basic 3D CAD with advanced motion simulation capabilities. freeCAD was developed as a tool for teaching and learning geometry, kinematics, dynamics, vibrations, mechanisms, linkages, cams, machine design and physics. It offers users the ability to create and manipulate assemblies of simple 3D solids that can be connected by joints, constraints, contacts, motors, actuators, springs, dampers, forces, torques or gravity.

Since freeCAD is written in VisualWorks Smalltalk and OpenGL, Aik-Siong considered it to be a logical choice for developing a native CAD for Croquet. His first step is to duplicate all the capabilities of freeCAD inside Croquet. Following that, he and his team plan to develop a GUI to take advantage of the solid modeling and NURBS capabilities inside freeCAD. Ultimately, Aik-Siong and his colleagues hope that their port can enable the default in-world content creation tool for Croquet.

Digital Rainout

2008-04-11T19:45:00.000-04:00

Today, Second Life became unavailable for the same reasons that 3rd party large-scale server-based architectures should not be relied on to support mission-critical virtual worlds in any serious way. The outage happened just at the time that Aaron Walsh of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative was hosting a Second Life in-world meeting to discuss the status of Media Grid's Immersive Education Platform Ecosystem, Education Grid, and the baseline requirements for the next generation (aka "3rd generation") of Immersive Education platforms. On the schedule was a discussion of the Cobalt peer-to-peer approach to platform scalability. Ironically, we were unable to discuss scalable peer-to-peer architectures today because of the lack of scalability of Second Life.

Here is what Linden Lab had to say about the outage: "In order to increase overall stability of the grid today during peak usage hours, our operations team has disabled a set of in world functions to reduce overall database load and create a more reliable experience for everyone. As a side effect of these temporary changes, some group and avatar profile services will not be available." Perhaps a more reliable experience for someone - but certainly not us. Its a shame that a modest thirty or so people who were trying to get together in world for a scheduled event were unable to do so because of who-knows-what was happening somewhere else in Second Life. Why shouldn't a mere thirty people be able to just get together without having to rely on the vagaries or expense of some commercial server infrastructure or service? Why should everyone be tied to a single bottleneck infrastructure? I guess the answer is that we need to step up our efforts to bring Cobalt to beta!

Croquet Doodles

2008-03-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

A wonderful collection of older and more recent Croquet demos created by David Faught.

Saving and Loading Spaces

2008-03-17T20:47:00.000-04:00

A new build of Cobalt has just been made available download. Added functionality includes the ability to save and load spaces from web or local directories. This means that you can now make your custom Cobalt spaces available to others as a kind of template virtual world over the web!

Contributing to Cobalt

2008-03-06T17:54:00.000-05:00

Right now there are four big ways you can contribute to Cobalt:

Software testing. The central place for tracking the state of Cobalt, feature additions, bug reports, and bugfixes is the Mantis bug tracker here. You'll first need to sign up here for a Mantis bug tracker account.

Content contributions. Contributions of artwork, motion capture files, meshes, textures, etc. should use the file upload feature of Mantis to include a files - or include a URL pointing to the contribution.

Code contributions. To contribute code, place a changeset in the monticello source code repository’s contributions area and then reference that changeset from an bug report in the Mantis bugtracker.

Hosting worlds. Given that Cobalt worlds are able to be saved as templates to ordinary web directories and then accessed by people using Cobalt from anywhere over the Internet, individuals can make an important contribution to the effort by either hosting world templates at their own URL, or by contributing .C3D templates to the project in the public domain. The very best worlds contributed to the Cobalt effort will be made available by Duke University through its Cobalt template directory (presently under development).

Please note that all software contributions to Cobalt must be made available under the Croquet license. All content contributions must be made available under either either the Croquet license or in the public domain. In submitting code or content, you are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. Please do not submit copyrighted work without permission.

Cobalt Released

2008-03-04T18:35:00.000-05:00

Cobalt is an emerging open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application being built using the open source Croquet SDK. A pre-alpha build of the Cobalt application is being made freely available to the emerging virtual worlds community by Duke University and its partners under the Croquet license. We hope that by doing so, we will foster a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of education and research.

The current build of Cobalt is located here.

The Monticello source code repository for Cobalt is located here.

The Cobalt-specific Mantis bug tracker is located here.

Software testing and bug reporting is a very important contribution to the effort. Doing so will help the Cobalt development community to identify areas in need of programming and re-engineering. Well-written bug reports can be an especially useful contribution by non-developers who are interested in advancing this effort during these early stages of Cobalt development. We hope that many of the community's software developers will consider taking on bug fixes.

Mark McCahill will be coordinating updates and code contributions to Cobalt to ensure compatibility with the base classes within the present Croquet SDK. In this way we can ensure that Cobalt development does not create a fork from the Croquet SDK. The goal here is to build a Croquet-based application that end-users can really use and then to contribute the application back to the Croquet Consortium for distribution as part of a future Croquet release. We hope that by making the pre-alpha available we can tap into the creative potential of the broader community as a way of advancing something that all of us can freely use to create deeply collaborative, greatly featured, and widely interlinked virtual environments on a very large scale. Lets do it!

The Server Dilemma

2008-02-23T13:18:00.000-05:00

The following quote from the article Second Earth (MIT Technology Review, July-August 2007) provides some interesting numbers around the server dilemma associated with server hosted virtual worlds such as Second Life:

This reimagining of the real world can go only so far, given current limitations on the growth of Linden Lab's server farm, the amount of bandwidth available to stream data to users, and the power of the graphics card in the average PC.

According to [Cory] Ondrejka [Linden Lab's now former CTO], Linden Lab must purchase and install more than 120 servers every week to keep up with all the new members pouring into Second Life, who increase the computational load by creating new objects and demanding their own slices of land. Each server at Linden Lab supports one to four "regions," 65,536-square-meter chunks of the Second Life environment--establishing the base topography, storing and rendering all inanimate objects, animating avatars, running scripts, and the like. This architecture is what makes it next to impossible to imagine re-creating a full-scale earth within Second Life, even at a low level of detail. At one region per server, simulating just the 29.2 percent of the planet's surface that's dry land would require 2.3 billion servers and 150 dedicated nuclear power plants to keep them running. It's the kind of system that "doesn't scale well," to use the jargon of information technology.

But then, Linden Lab's engineers never designed Second Life's back end to scale that way. Says Ondrejka, "We're not interested in 100 percent veracity or a true representation of static reality."

Croquet Skeletal Animation Part 2

2008-02-17T10:43:00.000-05:00

Another example video of skeletal animation in Croquet.

Croquet Skeletal Animation Part 1

2008-02-08T10:41:00.000-05:00

The Croquet team at the University of Minnesota, in collaboration with David Faught, is building a skeletal animation package that will be distributed as part of the next version of the Croquet SDK. They have been using this package internally for use in the Croquet-based proprietary language learning environment project called Croquetlandia (see previous post).

Sun's Wonderland

2008-01-27T22:23:00.000-05:00

Project Wonderland is a new Java-based open source (Gnu GPL v2) toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Wonderland has many very powerful features that make it a potentially useful virtual machine-based platform for creating virtual worlds that organizations can rely on as places to conduct, as Sun says, "real business". Within Wonderland virtual worlds, users are able to communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and games. This functionality is why Wonderland was recently chosen along with Second Life and Croquet as the immersive education platforms that will be receiving support from the Media Grid Institute. As with Second Life, Wonderland worlds are reliant on server infrastructures to support their basic use. By promoting the use of virtual worlds and giving away the client technology as open source, Sun is attempting to broadly increase demand for their servers. An interesting strategy...

Wii-mote Possibilities

2008-01-25T07:38:00.000-05:00

Here is a clever video from Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon University showing how you can use a Nintendo Wii-mote and home-made infrared LED light pens to create a low cost multi-touch interactive whiteboard system.

A CNI Interview

2008-01-20T21:37:00.000-05:00

Gerry Bayne recorded this 15 minute interview with me at The Coalition for Networked Information's 2007 Fall Task Force Meeting. CNI is dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about the important work that CNI is doing at their web site.

Why Second Life Won't Get a Third

2008-01-17T20:24:00.000-05:00

Max Borders opines on what he views as the key differences between Second Life and Croquet. Another piece comparing the two technologies can be found here.

Croquet Selected!

2008-01-13T07:09:00.000-05:00

This past weekend, it was announced at The Boston Media-Grid Summit that the Immersive Education Initiative (see article on the initiative's goals) 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 other two immersive education platforms selected were Sun's open source Project Wonderland client and the now open source Second Life client.

What this all means is that the open source Croquet platform's value will become better known and that the Immersive Education 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 event in Boston was an invitation-only affair hosted and sponsored by the Grid Institute, the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, and the City of Boston with participation from the Federation of American Scientists and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

A Croquet Spoof

2008-01-03T10:33:00.000-05:00

Recently posted by David Faught. Happy New Year!

Immersive Touching

2007-12-24T07:25:00.000-05:00

Immersive Touch is an augmented reality immersive system developed by Cristian J. Luciano, Greg Dawe, Pat Banerjee, and Lucian Florea at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Lab. It is among the first systems to integrate a haptic device with a head and hand tracking system and high resolution display. This makes it possible to maintain an overlap between the image and position of a haptic device. As you can see in the embedded video, users get a more realistic and natural way to interact in 3D objects in real time. This can be of great value as a way of training surgeons and other professionals who might well benefit from a little practice on a high-risk procedure. Imagine how Croquet could add a dimension of collaboration to such simulations....

Arts Metaverse Podcast

2007-12-23T01:07:00.000-05:00

In this podcast from one of Educause's 2007 podcasting sessions, UBC's Ulrich Rauch (at right) provides an informed overview of how UBC's Ancient Spaces project got started and how his team is connecting the projects using Croquet as a way of establishing the Arts Metaverse immersive 3D platform and social network. You can also download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Touchy-Feely Croquet

2007-12-21T22:20:00.000-05:00

UNC's Jeff VanDrimmelen has recently begun exploring ways to integrate haptic technology with Croquet virtual worlds. Haptic technology allows simulations to convey information to users in the form of mechanical stimulation. Haptic devices typically transmit information in the form of vibrations or motions, thereby creating a sense of touching or feeling virtual objects. The main types of haptic devices are 1) tactile feedback devices (that generate resistance to user input movement) and force feedback devices (that generate movement back to the input device).

The Novint Falcon device is a new haptic device developed for use as a gaming peripheral and input device. The user interacts with a small knob with three degrees of freedom in movement at the front of what is otherwise a stationary desktop device. The knob is attached to the main body via three multi-hinged and motorized arms. The step motors within the arms feel what the user is doing as well as apply forces back to the knob.

Jeff recently posted this video about his earliest effort to integrate the Novint Falcon haptic device with Croquet technology.

Duke Receives Mellon Award

2007-12-10T20:31:00.000-05:00

Today, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Duke University a $100,000 prize for leadership and development work to advance Croquet in the open source. The prize was one of ten presented as part of the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) which are given each year to not‐for‐profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities.

The award was presented at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington D.C. by Sir Timothy Berners‐Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the inventor of the World Wide Web. Duke’s MATC award was one of three that received the top prize of $100,000. The other award winners received prizes of $50,000 each. Award recipients were selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners‐Lee, Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), Vinton G. Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.), John Gage (Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media).

A New Logo

2007-12-06T22:42:00.000-05:00

I thought it was time for a change.

Croquelandia

2007-11-30T06:44:00.000-05:00

The University of Minnesota Croquet team led by Julie Sykes and Liz Wendland has developed a Croquet-based collaborative simulation of visiting another culture and using another language. It was developed as part of a grant to use Croquet as a teaching tool for Spanish Language Pragmatics. The simulation provides learners with a place to gain knowledge and practice language skills in a safe and non-threatening environment. Within this simulation they call Croquelandia, learners are able to collaborate with other learners or even native language speakers within the context of the world. The video trailer was filmed entirely on location in Croquelandia and edited by one of the multi-talented undergrad programmers at the U of M.

A Croquet Winter Wonderland

2007-11-25T08:32:00.000-05:00

It has emerged as a type of practice here in the United States for people to begin putting up holiday decorations on the weekend after our annual Thanksgiving celebration. In keeping with this, I offer this link to a new video from the folks at EduSim. In this one, they use a projected Croquet space in combination with a very compact eBeam input device that converts any surface (in this case a regular wall) into an interactive surface. The result is an on demand and relatively low cost interactive white board solution ($800-900 US) that, in combination with a data projector ($600-2,500 US) and Croquet software (free), may represent the beginnings of an economical alternative to traditional in-classroom visual communication boards (the typical front-of-the-classroom whiteboard/bulletin board installation is comparable in price). Could this be the earliest manifestation of a new form of broadly available classroom media for K-12?

Squeak by Example

2007-11-24T08:46:00.000-05:00

Croquet is written in Squeak, a modern open-source development environment for the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language (the first purely object-oriented language and environment). Squeak was used because Croquet required a number of capabilities that could only be provided by a true late bound, message sending language. Croquet's relationship to Squeak gives Croquet the property of a purely object-oriented system. This has allowed for some significant flexibility in the design and the nature of the protocols and architectures that have been developed for Croquet.

An essential property of Squeak is its ability to keep the system running while testing and making changes. Squeak allows even major changes to be performed incrementally and within a mere fraction of a second. Another key feature is Squeak's generalized storage allocator and garbage collector that is efficient in real-time so that animations and dynamic media of many kinds can be played while the garbage collector is collecting. It also allows reshaping of objects to be done safely. This is important to the creation and delivery of media rich collaborative virtual environments.

Early on in the project, a Java-based Croquet was considered. However, that approach was abandoned because Java lacks needed meta facilities. In many ways Squeak/Smalltalk is still far ahead of its successors in promoting a vision of an environment where everything is an object, and anything can change at run-time. This is an important property for virtual environments that are deeply flexible and modifiable as an immediate result of the actions people take within those environments. Still, the lack of significant corporate backing and marketing muscle behind Squeak/Smalltalk has meant that less capable technologies are the ones with which most of today's developers are most familiar.

To help more people get familiar with Squeak's very powerful programming environment, the new book Squeak by Example is now being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. It's intended for both students and developers and guides readers through the Squeak language and development environment by means of a series of examples and exercises. This is very useful to those who wish to become more familiar with the Croquet programming environment. You can either download the PDF for free, or you can buy a softcover copy from lulu.com.

Connecting Beyond the LAN

2007-11-21T20:20:00.000-05:00

Tim Wang recently posted an explanation of how to use the present Croquet SDK to connect with other Croquet peers outside of a local area network.

Avatars in First Life

2007-11-17T09:53:00.000-05:00

This video illustrates what real life might be like if we were limited to the avatar capabilities/interactions presently available in virtual worlds such as Second Life. It very much underscores the limitations in the ways we are able to represent ourselves within today's 3D gaming and chat environments. If we are going to leverage virtual environments to support interactions between people, then we need far better ways of representing ourselves within them. Our representations should ideally be able to project as fully as possible the broadest range of human cues and capabilities. Clearly, 3D virtual worlds have a long way to go in this regard. As a first step, we need to get past the dress-up doll house metaphor that appears to have emerged for interaction within these environments.

The static avatars presently made available as placeholders in the Croquet SDK are far less capable than those of Second Life. Still, the Croquet SDK offers developers an opportunity to change whatever they need about the way people are represented with virtual environments. Opportunities for avatar experimentation are huge. Just imagine avatars that contain action triggers, link buttons, or even multiple on-board virtual environments. The possibilities through Croquet are as limitless as the imaginations brought to bear on the problem (and of course the resources expended in implementing them). The flexibility and efficiency of the Croquet programming environment gives researchers and other creatives far more capability in exploring how best to represent presence in virtual environments than is available with today's commercial 3D world technologies.

I should point out that all of the .mdl avatars that the Croquet SDK now uses actually came from an early version of the Alice project and from Squeak's Wonderland. However, the Croquet team at the University of Minnesota is working on some nicer avatars that will likely be made available in the next version of the Croquet SDK. A preview of the Minnesota avatars can be seen briefly on the Croquet video in a previous post. Also, Matt Schmidt and his team in Missouri are also beginning to experiment with avatar improvements and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

What's in a Game?

2007-11-14T05:51:00.000-05:00

"If game sounds frivolous, call it a simulation. If simulation sounds too stuffy or expensive, call it a game."

- William Horton, E-Learning by Design (2006)

RENCI Joins the Consortium!

2007-11-11T07:42:00.000-05:00

I am pleased to announce that the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) recently joined the Croquet Consortium. RENCI is a major collaborative venture of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University. Supported by the state of North Carolina, RENCI focuses on finding solutions to complex, multidisciplinary problems. The institute is a virtual organization that includes facilities at the three Triangle universities, East Carolina University, and the University of North Carolina Asheville. RENCI's mission is to bring together scientists, technology experts, educators, artists, humanists and business and government leaders to address today’s most challenging multidisciplinary problems. By applying technological expertise and the world’s best computing, networking and data resources to these issues, RENCI strives to lead the effort to create a collaborative 21st-century problem solving environment designed to spur economic growth and lead to the next generation of transformative discoveries.

Imagining the Internet

2007-11-10T19:42:00.000-05:00

Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast is a multi-section online resource containing thousands of pages. It contains predictive pronouncements about the future of humankind drawn from thousands of people from every corner of the world - people from the past and from the present - experts and non-experts alike. The site is made possible by The Elon University/Pew Internet Project and is intended to expose future possibilities while simultaneously providing a peek back at the past. The site was conceived, developed, edited and maintained by Janna Quitney Anderson, an assistant professor at Elon University and director of Internet projects at Elon University's School of Communications.

Building a Lesson in EduSim

2007-11-06T17:36:00.000-05:00

Here is another video tutorial developed by Rich White at the Greenbush EduSim project showing how to bring resources into an EduSim/Croquet world and how apply textures to those resources.

Tragedy in the Commons

2007-11-04T21:01:00.000-05:00

At sometime during the night of Monday, February 26, 2007 a group of republican Second Life users, some sporting "Bush '08" tags, vandalized the John Edwards Second Life HQ. Though amusing to some, this type of activity underscores the need for secure virtual spaces - not just spaces where anyone, dressed up as anything they wish, can go anywhere and do anything they want. Restrictions based on identity or group affiliation are particularly important for serious simulation-based educational and research environments. Click here for a more detailed view of the damage.

How Croquet is Different

2007-11-03T07:35:00.000-04:00

In recent months, more and more people have been asking me how Croquet is different from Second Life - thanks to all the media buzz around Second Life. Let me break it down this way: Croquet, as a software development environment, is more extensible than the development environments used to create collaborative worlds such as those in Second Life, and before that the unified metaverse of ViOS. These early server-based commercial approaches to establishing large-scale metaverses do not create computational environments that users/programmers can actually control - instead they must rely on constrained server-based computational environments to capture eyeballs for a variety of schemes to derive revenue for those who run the servers.

By contrast, Croquet makes it possible to develop any number of interlinked metaverses that can be deployed independently of a commercial authority or the constraints imposed by server-imposed resource limitations. The less cyberlibertarian of you may find value in the fact that Croquet can also be used by institutions to implement far more capable and flexible and controllable commercial systems than those of Second Life and before that ViOS.

Here are some additional points that distinguish Croquet from its predecessors/cohorts:

Croquet's users/developers may freely share, modify and view the source code of the entire system.
Croquet is platform and device independent.
Croquet's users/developers may freely share, modify and view the source code of the entire system.
Croquet provides a complete professional programming language, integrated development environment, and class library in every distributed, running participant’s copy.
Croquet-based worlds can be updated while the system is live and running.

Marginalia on Steroids

2007-10-31T06:22:00.000-04:00

Here is a video created by the Squeak-based Sophie-server project being done by a software architecture group at the University of Potsdam in Germany. It shows how a Sophie server-based technology can be used to enrich the way of reading books.

Sophie Server is a server application providing functionality to be used through Sophie Author, Sophie Reader, or even a Web browser. Sophie Server provides a home for all Sophie Books that exist in a shared networked environment, allowing users to search for, access, and contribute to them. The Sophie project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. See my earlier post for more information on the project.

As you can see in the video, Sophie is not just a tool to render traditional paper books for reading on a screen. Instead, the project goes way beyond the notion of eBooks by leveraging the deep interactive capabilities of your networked computer. Sophie is basically an easy-to-use digital media assembly tool which allows both you and others to combine images, text, video, and audio into a single multimedia document containing multiple layers of information. This approach promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people.

Making Martians with Croquet

2007-10-28T11:20:00.000-04:00

A nice video of kids making Martians with a Croquet-based interactive whiteboard application prototype. What I find exciting about this video is that through the power of this technology, these children are engaged in deeply creative, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative activity that involves art, science, and technology. These types of environments could be quite valuable as tools for engaging students in science and technology. Just imagine what a bunch of adults might do with this stuff...

The Importance of Being Obvious

2007-10-27T07:13:00.000-04:00

When giving demos, I'm often struck by how important it is for a good many people to see a full implementation of a graphically-rich Croquet environment. Apparently, it takes a built-out virtual space for many of them begin appreciating the potential of the underlying system. That's a shame, since the Croquet technology is not really about the content that you put into it. With the limited resources at our disposal, we've been focused on functionality rather than the eye candy.

Still, graphical elements such as richly textured models and other content within virtual worlds are important because they are the first things that people see - and connect with. Some popular 3D worlds such as Second Life are perhaps not as much about the capabilities of their enabling technology as they are about enabling access to content and social presence.

Like it or not, it is for the most part that graphical eye candy and elements of content that frame people's perception of the underlying technology. I consider such elements of any richly-rendered 3D world scene in Croquet to be merely content within a system having deep capabilities. Yet, the models and textures set the tone for the experience of discovering what Croquet is all about since they have the potential to provoke a deep emotional connection between the user and the simulation. When you think about it, the very best of the 2D web browser applications available today are of no value unless they are used as viewers of web content. In fact, regardless of how wonderful their inner workings, the best and worst of them would be of equally minor value to users.

To date, many of the models and textures made available in the Croquet SDK were borrowed from the Alice project, other content was thrown into the distribution with little consideration of quality - after all, our efforts have been centered around improving the underlying technology and not the content. However, now that we are building the first open applications with Croquet, you will be seeing a lot more and different content as examples in the distribution. I believe that once users can access spaces that other users have built, then the quality of content accessible via Croquet worlds will increase greatly through the dynamics of social software systems.

I'm hoping that readers of this blog would be interested in helping with this by making textured 3D content available to the Croquet project. Please email me if you are able and willing to create quality content and scenes that we could include as part of the next release of the Croquet SDK and future applications. Your participation in this exciting project would be most welcome.

Rubikubist Croquet

2007-10-26T00:12:00.000-04:00

Interesting video of a Croquet-based implementation of Erno Rubik's Magic Cube puzzle. It's amazing what can be done with the Croquet development environment and a little creativity. For solutions to the dastardly 3x3x3 cube, see Dan Brown's nicely narrated two part tutorial: Part 1, Part 2.

Matty X's Quick and Dirty Guides

2007-10-25T00:16:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month, Matt Schmitt began blogging on his experiences around researching, designing, and building Croquet learning environments as part of his doctoral thesis work at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Making note of the need for better documentation around the current Croquet SDK, Matt has taken the initiative to begin developing a series of nicely done how-to guides for the SDK. Here are links to his first three installments:

Guide I shows you how to successfully initiate the KCroquetParticipant subclass from within Squeak.

Guide II shows how to identify basic elements of a Squeak script and how to make minor changes to provided code examples.

Guide III shows how to assign a script to a button in Squeak and then change the name of the button.

Big Screens and Wii-Croquet

2007-10-24T00:27:00.000-04:00

Matt Schmitt and Sean Goggins recently developed this video demo showing how a Wii controller can be used as an input device for Croquet worlds on large format screens. Matt is a curriculum developer/designer working with Croquet environments as part of his doctoral research at the University of Missouri-Columbia's School of Information Science and Learning Technologies. Like the folks at UBC (see my previous post), Matt is also using DarwiinRemote.

Pre-K Croquet

2007-10-23T07:34:00.000-04:00

Math, art, and computer skills activities in Croquet-enabled pre-kindergarten, 1st, and 3rd grade classrooms.

"Gee, Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore" -- Dorothy Gale

More Bad Predictions

2007-10-22T05:32:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's blog posting prompted me to once again make available (this time as an embedded video) this wonderful short film that was done for Red Hat by the folks at Capstrat, a strategic communications firm here in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Over the past ten years I have personally witnessed numerous declarations that "there is no real value to 3D user interfaces" and that virtual environments will "never be used beyond entertainment." I have also been admonished that "3D is frivolous" and that "everything you need to do with a computer can be done with 2D windowing interfaces just fine." At this time I won't identify the people who have said these things. Suffice it to say that they are all attributable to people who are well known in the information technology and venture capital world. You know who you are... ;)