Really Virtual Spaces

The ability to paint dynamic video derived textures to sets of polygons in Croquet spaces makes it possible to project images of reality into virtual reality. Croquet based environments can now not only have people interacting with one another as video avatars, but they can also interact with one another within representations derived from real world contexts in real time. Current Croquet technology makes it possible to 'painthttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.photo.gif' each of the four walls of a stationary skybox with each of four video feeds taken from four cameras in a particular real-world location (of course, with the right math and a fish-eye lens, a single feed could also come from one camera, be distorted, and then 'painted' on all four walls). In this way, the entire user experience in a Croquet space could be framed by real-time video images of real places.

Who might use such a capability? Consider any situation where experts might need to get together to make decisions about an emerging and poorly-defined situation where the ability to 'look around', discuss, and annotate what is happening is of importance. Projecting images from a single video source into a collaborative Croquet space could offer crucial information feed and quickly establish a meaningful context for dealing with new and emerging real-world situations. The interface between the real and the virtual is an area of deep interest as we move forward with our work.

Back from NLII

The NLII meeting in New Orleans was worthwhile and rewarding - and New Orleans is quite the place to be, even the week before Mardi Gras! Mark and I ended up staying right in the French Quarter and were quite unprepared for the level of revelry that takes place in the week preceeding the official Mardi Gras celebration. A pleasant surprise. The streets were filled all night with very loud and boisterous revelment (pardonnez mon français faible). Still, we were able to adequately rest up for the preconference Croquet presentation the next morning. ;)

At the preconference session, we met some key people in the higher education IT world. The response to Croquet was very positive, and we've now been invited to attend the Emerging Practices and Learning Technologies in Higher Education NLII Focus Session at Rice University on Mar 8-9, 2005 whose attendees will be exploring strategies for anticipating, evaluating and incorporating new and emerging information technologies on their campuses. This should provide valuable insights into how we might best approach the issues around deploying Croquet in higher education settings.

I am particularly gratified to read a Croquet-related blog posting from one of the attendees at the NLII preconference session. It appeared here. Here is an excerpt:

"...I don’t think I’ll ever need to eat again.

But I should really speak to the NLII annual meeting, and not just to the New Orleans milieu, although, well, whew, what a town. Appetite city.

As wonderful as the food has been, though, the intellectual feast has already topped it. The session on Croquet yesterday morning left me rubbing my eyes in near-disbelief as I witnessed a demonstration of a 3D recursive meta-environment in which people, places, and things can be placed in rich contexts that are themselves meaningful creations, often collaborative creations. I saw a landscape in which one could carry around a 3D “snapshot” of a space that was dynamically updated even as one carried it around. In short, I saw a model of individual cognition externalized, cognition networked with other minds in a social context that was compelling, fun, piquant, and a little mysterious. Imagine a Magritte painting that first becomes “real,” and then becomes a prompt that asks students to reconceive their own conceptual work in a course–together. It’s very difficult to explain, but once you see it in action, impossible to forget. I’ll never be satisfied with the desktop metaphor for computing again.


I do believe that Croquet is a way to bootstrap the Secret Society for Real School into the next key stage of its development. The first stage, an increasing dissatisfaction with a status quo in which education scales by means of an industrial model, is already upon us. That stage will end, I think, with some kind of popular revolt in which traditional schooling (traditional in the sense of what we’ve had for the last 100 years, not in the sense of, say, the Platonic Academy) will face crippling competition with other more compelling and convenient providers. I hope before we get to the end of that stage that the social and expertise contexts of real school will be freed from deadening 50-75 minute periods to explore its real potential as an ongoing conference devoted to, as Jerome Bruner put it, raising consciousness about the possibilities of communal mental experience. Subject areas, specific knowledge, even quizzes will still be part of the experience. But as with a good conference, the narrative that threads through the individual courses will continually inspire fresh perspectives–and a powerful sense of shared mission. A sense, finally, of occasion. Which brings Croquet back into the picture: the sense of occasion provided by that 3d object-oriented landscape, both dreamy and a little edgy, makes explicit the mental landscape we want our students to inhabit and, at last, build with us."

At the C5 Conference

Well, most of the crew is here at the beautiful Granvia Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. Alan, David Smith, Andreas, and Mark are just down the hall. We are all taking a break in the midst of the Third International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (C5 2005). This conference is emerging as the primary venue for those working with Croquet. It is intended as an international forum for the discussion and presentation of creative and collaborative environments among researchers, developers and users of collaboration technologies, learning environments, and object-oriented languages (especially Smalltalk, Squeak and Croquet). This year, there are a total of six papers that deal primarily with Croquet. Alan gave the keynote entitled "The ARPA Dream Revisited". Mark and I then gave our two papers on user interface approaches for higher education authoring/learning environments. Immediately afterwards, David Smith rocked our worlds with a demonstration of Filters and Tasks in Croquet. More on that in a future posting....

NLII Annual Meeting

Mark and I have been invited to present a pre-conference workshop on Croquet at the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative's (NLII) Annual Meeting on January 23rd, 2005 in New Oleans, LA. The NLII is an EDUCAUSE program that focuses on creating learning environments that use information technology tools to improve teaching and learning, reduce costs, and provide greater access to higher education. NLII is very much interested in virtual communities that can be used to augment or replace face-to-face interactions. Another area of interest is in games and simulations which have become a natural part of many students’ environment. NLII positioning argues that the motivation, engagement, and active learning associated with games makes them a potentially useful tool for educators. The NLII’s particular interest in games and simulations is to gain a fresh view of cognition and learning by looking at games as the intersection of play, pedagogy, and technology. Mark and I are greatly looking forward to this meeting and hope that we can make some good contacts with people who understand the power of what we are developing in Croquet.

Croquet, Everyone?

The following article written by Quentin Hardy and entitled "Croquet, Everyone?" just appeared in the technology section of Forbes Magazine's January 31st issue:

"Alan Kay, a legend in computing, thought it was time for something better. So he built it.

Thirty years ago Alan Kay oversaw the creation of many of the personal computer's clever innovations, among them windows, point-and-click file opening and networks. His lasting success irks him. "Except for the silicon, we've only gotten 5% of the potential of the PC revolution," he says.

Kay wants to take computing forward with his next great invention, an operating system that puts the user in a three-dimensional graphic world with scores of other users, all computing collaboratively and communicating through audio and visual messaging. Called Croquet, it runs on top of operating systems like Windows, Linux and Apple. Its innovation is in relocating the now-decades-old interface of windows and folders to a shared virtual world. You can landscape it any way you want, with mountain ranges, oceans or meeting rooms. Users become color icons or, if you'd rather, 3-D characters such as fish or bunnies. You zoom around in this rich, icon-filled space and call up digital photos, Web pages, science projects or PowerPoint presentations.

You can view and alter other users' files in one place, chat with those other users over the Internet and then move on to far-off objects and people, if they seem interesting. A budget report's graphics, say, might be made a figurative 10 feet tall, then changed by one user to reflect new sales data, then recolored by someone else for sharper resolution. You can do all this even if your Internet connection is a creaky-slow dial-up modem.

Croquet packs a lot of power for a little piece of software, one with but a single line of code for every 300 in Windows XP. Kay built Croquet with help from six crack programmers, funding it first with his own money and then through Hewlett-Packard's research labs, where he is a senior fellow. The total cost for the project, released for free last October, is less than $10 million, a drop in a Microsoft bucket. Says Kay: "Good math and small teams win."

In the 1970s Kay, now 64 years old, was an early member of Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center. Some of his inventions from that time, including an object-oriented programming language called Smalltalk, went into Croquet. He later worked on 3-D graphics at gamemaker Atari, compact computing systems at Apple Computer and easy-to-use interfaces at Disney.

Croquet comes as many institutions struggle with large, spread-out teams. The U.S. military is evaluating Croquet for training radio technicians to build field communications systems in virtual terrain replicating the landscape in Iraq. This spring the universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin will try Croquet for collaborative classroom labs. Intel, whose average employee is at any time on three different projects, is looking at Croquet as a way to make juggling work projects gamelike.

HP is playing Croquet by giving it away as an open-source project to build a user base quickly and to get an early read on what this sort of software will be useful for. "We don't get too focused on how to make money yet," says Patrick Scaglia, Kay's boss at HP. "We'll know within a couple of years. Good ideas take off rapidly, or they die.""

Elevator Pitches

Elevator pitches are 30 second explanations of ideas. Croquet still needs a good one. Its not for lack of trying that we don't yet have a good one. This is because it is a very complex idea with many parts. What we probably need to do is tailor a set of pitches with each one oriented towards a particular audience type.

As noted earlier in this blog (Like an Elephant), the perception, if not value, of Croquet is very much different to different people. So, I thought it might be useful - and perhaps a bit entertaining - to have us use this blog as a way of collecting some elevator pitches from the members of our emerging community.

So here is the challenge: Please post to the comments what you believe to be an good elevator pitch for all or some aspect our project. It would be great if you would sign your contribution.

Should be interesting...

Dump the World Wide Web!

Here's an interesting excerpt from an article written by Bill Thompson that appeared on the www.opendemocracy.net website on December 23rd, 2004. What Thompson is saying has a good deal of relevance to what we are doing with Croquet. I will let the reader decide on where that relevance might be. Comments on this posting are particulary welcome.

"The World Wide Web is dead. Like a cartoon character running off a cliff but making it some way out into space before awareness brings gravity back into operation, it may continue to dominate our online lives a little longer, but its day is over.

Soon the whole clumsy, inadequate edifice will come crashing to the cyberspatial equivalent of the ground and we will look back upon the crazy decade from 1994 to 2004 for what it was – a dead-end in the development of the networked world.

The reasons are simple: the web, like many a political refugee, lacks a state. What’s worse, it doesn’t speak a language that will let it express anything more than basic requests for food, shelter or yet another poorly-resized JPEG image. Like all analogies this one breaks down pretty quickly if you scratch it too hard, but it’s worth keeping in mind during the (necessarily) more technical explanation you’re about to encounter.

It is important to understand how the web works. The web, like email, uses a “client-server” model. The client, in this case your browser, requests something – a web page – from a server. When a request is received, and assuming the parts are all there and the client has permission to take them, they are sent over the network by the server. It’s then up to the client to deal with them appropriately. In the case of a web page the elements will usually be a document written using HTML, the hypertext markup language, some image files and maybe extra bits and pieces. It is all very simple, and it’s made even simpler because the browser and the server communicate using a language of their very own called the Hypertext Transport Protocol, or HTTP.

The browser takes what it is given and displays it on your screen, laid out as prettily as it can manage. However once we want to do anything more complicated than display a page of text and graphics on a screen we rapidly discover that both HTML and HTTP are simply not up to the job.

The problems with HTML are serious but understandable. When Tim Berners-Lee created the web he wanted a simple text-based publishing tool for the high-energy physics community, and a simple markup language that let authors specify headings and link to other documents was fine.

But in 1993 two graduate students at a United States university decided they could improve on Tim’s work by writing a new browser which would display images too. In order to make this work they had to change HTML by adding the < IMG > tag – and they started a process of non-standard extensions which continues to this day.

The result is the mess we see today, where despite the best efforts of the standards bodies it is still necessary to write dozens of lines of code at the start of a web page in order to figure out which browser is in use, so that the “correct” version of the page can be sent over.

Present at the creation

It’s an appalling mess, but it wasn’t directly Tim’s fault. However the same cannot be said for HTTP, the protocol which allows browsers to ask for pages and servers to send them across the network. Here Tim’s desire for simplicity has led directly to our current problems, because he decided that the server should treat each request for a page from a browser as a separate transaction. The decision to make HTTP a “stateless” protocol has caused immense trouble. It’s rather like being served by a waiter with short-term memory loss: you can only order one course at a time because he will have forgotten your name, never mind your dessert order, by the time you’ve had your first spoonful of gazpacho.

Unfortunately many of the things that we want the web to do for us, from online shopping to having a newspaper that tailors its pages to our interests, rely on some degree of long-term interaction between client and server. Cookies, small data files that are placed on a client computer by the server, provide a partial solution, rather like the tattoos sported by Guy Pearce in the film Memento, but they are inelegant, complicated and far from reliable. As, indeed, the tattoos turn out to be.

We have spent the last decade fighting against the limitations of the web standards, extending, breaking, reinventing and compromising with them to the point where you can just about do online shopping, make pages look reasonably attractive and even offer personalised services.

But enough is enough. Just as it is sometimes necessary to demolish old buildings to make way for new, so it is time to move on from the web. It isn’t as if we need to look far for an alternative – we’ve had one since 1990 when the web was just starting to emerge from CERN physics lab. It’s called “distributed processing” and it enables programs to talk to each other in a far richer, more complex and more useful way than the web’s standards could ever support.

Had it not been for the rush to embrace the web’s page-based publishing model, choosing the simple solution over the right one, we would have proper distributed systems available today. Instead we have to invent technologies which preserve the web approach while making it slightly more usable, like the eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. Any tool that is too embarrassed even to use the first letter of its full name for an abbreviation is surely in trouble from the start.

Unusually for a company which is credited with following trends rather than creating them, Microsoft saw this first. They never liked the web and it was only the horrible realisation that every company, every net user and every competitor was going to invest a vast amount of money, effort and resources making it seem like it worked that forced Bill Gates to turn the company around and give it a web focus late in 1995.

At the time their programmers were just beginning to explore the possibility of direct programme-to-programme communication and network-based collaboration between applications. Without the distraction of the web we may well have had widespread distributed online services five or even more years ago.

These services would not rely on the Web browser as the single way of getting information from an online service, but would allow a wide range of different programs to work together over the network. We already accept that email, chat and even music sharing do not have to be Web-based, but we can go much further.

A news site could deliver text, images, audio and even video through a program designed for the purpose, instead of having to use a general-purpose browser, or a shopping site could build its own shopping cart and checkout that did nor rely on Web protocols. And we would have no need for Google, because information services would advertise their contents instead of having to be searched by inefficient ‘spiders’.

The web may have served a purpose once, giving net users something relatively simple to look at and use and convincing the world that being online was a good thing, but it has done so at great cost to the network’s architecture and has diverted research into usable, scalable and functional distributed systems for the last decade.

There is a deep need among the users for something better than the shoddy, half-baked hypertext publishing model that we geeks foolishly embraced back in the early 1990s. If we do not start delivering it the net itself will stumble, fail and eventually die away, trapped in this stateless web of deceit."