Metaverse Interoperability

For some time now, Laurence Rozier has been developing a message format that, among other things, can allow for interoperability between metaverse environments. Called Remote Actions Packets (RAP), it basically makes it possible for someone to do something in, say, Second Life and have that same action replicated in Croquet - and vice versa. RAP messages consist of an actor identifier, an action name, and an encoded list of stage directions.

In this simple video, you will see a Croquet window (on the right) side by side with a Second Life window (on the left). Each shows a live running world containing a simple cube. When the cube in Second Life is clicked, a script runs that causes the cube to move. Almost immediately, you will see this action replicated in the Croquet world. Next, a Croquet menu select initiates a move of the cube in the Croquet window. After a short delay, the simple cube movement is mirrored in Second Life.

The implications of Laurence's work are that Croquet worlds can now be made to mirror aspects of Second Life worlds - and vice versa. This also means that there's now a way by which actions taken within metaverses such as Croquet can be logged to text files. That particular capability would be of great importance to educators, researchers, and marketers who are interested in understanding what kinds of things have taken place in Croquet environments.

A Curved Space Explorer

The Collaborative Curved Space Explorer (CCSE) - is an effort by Nikolay Suslov to develop a full-featured multi-user Toolbox for exploring the structure of curved spaces in 3D. It is built using the Croquet 1.0 SDK. The goal of this effort is to build specialized Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) using Croquet (and OpenGL). Features of CCSE include: 1) The ability to exploring the structure of the curved space by deep interaction with it; 2) The ability to do real-time rendering in curved spaces (using the Jeff Weeks algorithm); 3) The ability to bring personal objects into the environment and ability to visually transform them in different curved spaces; 4) The ability to explore operation schemes on objects allowed by a selected curved space by multi-user interactions in shared spaces; 5) The ability to do 3D content creation in a selected curved space; and 6) The implementation of a curved space database.

This work is also intended to support the goals of the open source Croquet Project itself by implementing an expanded view on the Croquet's 'spaces' architecture and purposes, as per the CCSE vision (where every operation in space or every object presentation is determined by the structure of selected curved space and it's properties [i.e.; in flat, hyperbolic or spherical spaces etc.]). Similar fundamental manipulations of objects and representational spaces cannot be readily done using the existing toolkits for other metaverse envrionments.

For additional information via the CCSE home click here.

Sophie

Sophie is new open source Squeak Smalltalk-based software application for creating digital multimedia books that are easy to build. A product of the Institute for the Future of the Book, It is in essence a multimedia authoring system. Sophie-generated books can resemble regular books containing text and pictures, or they may also contain video, audio clips, images in a slide show, other books, links out to the web, and allow for reader interaction.

Sound a lot like what the web was supposed to be? You bet. The difference is that Sophie has been developed as a tool to enable non-technical people to assemble digital documents without needing to learn complex computer languages or to rely on programmers. Still, Sophie uses a human-readable distributed XML format to ensure that a user's content remain accessible for decades to come. Should a particular title need features beyond those provided by Sophie (such as performance or databasing) there is little in the way of preventing those systems from being plugged in on a per book or per distribution basis.

The intent of Sophie is to facilitate the shift from page to screen as a means of scholarly communication. Many academics find it difficult to move to the digital medium because of the technical barriers to doing so in a sophisticated manner. That has a lot to do with why the Research in Information Technology Program of the the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts chose to fund this project.

Sophie is device and OS independent - and best of all, because of its implementation in Squeak, it is fundamentally compatible as a powerful tool within Croquet-based immersive environments. In fact, we are currently exploring what it might take to combine these powerful technologies into a single application and in so doing, bring to bear the power of distributed multimedia authoring directly into late-binding and device-independent collaborative immersive environments - kind of like a powerful open source groupware solution with 3D capabilities. To bring these technologies together would be of great value to education and beyond - and would represent an excellent choice for our developing communities. :)

Sophie is available here, and a video demo is here (the demo starts at: 23:32).

A CIO Insight

Alan Kay was recently interviewed for CIO Insight magazine's Expert Voices feature. In this piece entitled Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now, Alan discusses the mindsets that stand in the way of real innovation - and what his not-for-profit VPRI is doing to address the issue. In the article, Alan defines Croquet as one of those efforts and as "a new way of doing an operating system, or as a layer over TCP/IP that automatically coordinates dynamic objects over the entire Internet in real time. This coordination is done efficiently enough so that people with just their computers, and no other central server, can work in the same virtual shared space in real time."

Pictures at an Exhibition

Igrishe is a recently developed Croquet-based art installation tool. Essentially a distributed slideshow, it allows artists to build/run realtime performances/VJ sessions in theaters, art galleries, and learning labs. Its developer, Nikolay Suslov, is a Ph.D. student from Vologda State Technical University (Informational Systems and Technology Department)(Russian Federation, Vologda). The installation, running in Moscow at Russia State Tretyakov Gallery, involves the connection of a real-world space consisting of three walls with a virtual projection in 3D. Rendering is done by 3 computers (one per wall) connected in network with running Croquet image on every machine. Because it is built in Croquet, this system is scalable to any number of walls/projections. The effect is that an artist gets a full featured connected virtual/real space to manipulate. Above is a photo of the actual installation.

Croquet by Analogy

Croquet is initially being made available as an open source software developer's toolkit (the Croquet SDK) rather than as an application. However, this seems to be a bit of a difficult concept for a good many metaverse enthusiasts who have downloaded the Croquet SDK with the expectation of immediately using it as one would an application. This would be like someone downloading a C++ toolkit and then expecting to be able to easily create and navigate 3D spaces through an already existing and well developed GUI - without doing any additional coding beyond what were provided as examples with the C++ toolkit!

Part of the challenge here is that the Croquet SDK contains code examples (in the form of Squeak "objects") that when launched, actually produce somewhat navigable and moderately functional 3D spaces. In doing so, these components of the SDK give the misleading appearance that one is using a true application per se. These code example "objects" provided within the SDK are more akin to demonstration "applets". So, to consider the Croquet SDK an application would be to miss the point of what we are seeking to build at this point in the project.

In this sense, today's Croquet SDK is not equivalent to applications such as ViOS or Second Life. Instead, an appropriate analogy (or low-res comparison) is that the present Croquet SDK is to a future Croquet-based metaverse application as a C++ SDK is to ViOS or Second Life.

Laying the Foundations

Given the relative public silence around the Croquet project in recent months, I've been getting lots of emails asking about what's been happening since last Spring's Beta release. Well, there's been a lot going on. Several of us have been hard at work developing the foundations for a larger and more inclusive public effort around the project. With the transitioning to Croquet 1.0, we are in the process of setting up a not-for-profit corporation to house the open source project. The corporation will provide the governance structure required to ensure that continued development of the open source technology and that local Croquet development efforts receive the support they need from a self-sustaining and growing community of peers.

On the technology side, there are many dedicated people who have also been hard at work debugging and hardening the system for its move out of Beta. For this, special thanks need to go to Howard Stearns, Mark P. McCahill and his team at Minnesota, David A. Smith, Andreas Raab, Joshua Gargus, Ed Boyce, and Dan Fakken, for doing what needed doing. We are now testing and working on documentation and our efforts are coming to a point where the silence will soon be broken.