Progress for Pilgrims

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!

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

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

Lively is Dead

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

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

Anad Agarawala demos his physics-enabled desktop metaphor.

VNC in Cobalt!

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!