Arts Metaverse

Arts Metaverse is an educational 3D immersive environment based on Croquet that provides an opportunity for scholars, teachers, students, and interested individuals to create their own virtual space where they can interact and collaborate with others. Initiated by the University of British Columbia's Arts Instructional Suppport & Information Technology unit, the Arts Metaverse project seeks to provide a rich network of interlinked multiuser Croquet spaces in support of collaboration in the arts. It's really great to see such significant uptake of Croquet even though the SDK is still in Beta! Many thanks go to its creators Tim Wang and Ulrich Rauch.

Recently, Tim posted an entry on his eLearning blog that addresses the reasons for the project's choice of Croquet over the increasingly popular commercial metaverse platform of Second Life. Here is what he has to say:

"I first learned about Open Croquet in early 2006, through a conversation with Scott Leslie. I was coordinating the technical development team on the Ancient Spaces project at the moment. After a few hours of fiddling, I got the beta Croquet installed and working on a Windows machine. However, it took me months to understand and appreciate the power behind this genius system. It then quickly obtained my attention from further developing the Buchanan Island in the Second Life system. Many people have asked me why? Without going into the details of the differences between Open Croquet and Second Life, I can give you two main reasons of this shift: Open Source and high quality 3D modeling. Second Life island cost a lot of money and all objects in the world of second life must be created using the basic primitives. Open Croquet allows me to freely import high quality 3D models from any professional 3D authoring programs like Blender, 3D Max or Maya 3D. Besides these two differences, there are also some other key advantages with Croquet:

• A powerful P2P net work support. When I run Croquet in my office, it automatically detects other computers around me that are running Croquet.
• The portal technology allows application sharing between different operating systems. Say I can play a PC game with my Mac friends.
• Video conferencing and other communication tools without using server technology.
• Allows users freely define the space being created, this will provide the “land owners” (the academics) complete customizable controls of the environment. (e.g. not just define the gravitational force in the land)
• Easy to back up the contents published using Croquet, easy to take them on line and off line, this avoid many copy-right issues.
• From some aspects, a structured p2p Croquet net work is much more secure than a server based large scale metaverse."

Click here for the Arts Metaverse project website.

The above screenshot shows a model of Machu Picchu within the Croquet-based Arts Metaverse.