"Things"

One of the ideas we are exploring is the notion that what you interact with in Croquet can be categorized as some combination of "people", "places", and "things". One of our goals is to make the creation of "things" in what we are calling Croquet "places" as simple and easy as possible - even for untrained users. To that end, we are beginning to prototype properties panels that allow users to adjust the characteristics and behaviors of "things" within croquet "places". Such properties panels would be accessed when mousing over a "thing" via a right click menu option.




You can think of a Croquet thing as one or more objects that are grouped. A noisy wooden box in a croquet space would be a thing consisting of wireframe, texture, and sound objects. Such a thing might be assigned attributes at the level of the thing itself. For example, one might easily give the noisy wooden box certain drag or spin behaviors through a properties panel (rather than through the existing package browser).



The assignment of properties to composite "things" begins getting very interesting when we more completely integrate the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) into Croquet. A user might then be able to specify properties of mass, elasticity, etc.. The integration of ODE with Croquet is presently underway and will make it possible to develop collaborative physcal simulations quickly and easily by accessing the properties panels for "things" in a Croquet place. Before you get to excited about this, keep in mind that ODE is essentailly non-deterministic and it will therefore require much work before it can be used in multiuser mode within Croquet. David Smith considers the multiuser integration of ODE into Croquet to be a high priority.