Croquet 2 Play

In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, black-and-white was the term for people connecting to the metaverse via free public terminals which resulted in their avatars appearing in a flickering, low-res, no color form. This fictional situation implied extensive interoperability so that different devices and programs could access the metaverse. In the actual meshverse of today, interoperability hasn’t existed - until now. In the simple video below, you see a Croquet window side by side with a Second Life window. Each shows a world with a cube. At the start the Second Life cube on the right is clicked on, which runs a script causing it to move. Shortly thereafter, you see this action replicated in the Croquet world to the left. Next a Croquet menu select moves the cube in the Croquet window and after a short delay, you see the cube in Second Life move in the same manner. This is possible because the cube object in both environments understands the same message format, something I’ve been working on for over a decade called Remote Action Packets(RAP). In the demo below, because of Croquet’s TeaTime, all Croquet participants would also see the cube move. RAP takes this even further by distributing messages to any RAP aware clients. Each client can render that message in the manner most appropriate for it. A text client might simply display “cube: moved right”. There’s a lot more work and documentation to be done but I’d promised folks at the Intermeshverse Group meeting I’d show demos this week and this is as good a starting point for public discussion so here we go! For Second Life folks there will be RAP code to play with along with some other goodies in the next 24 hours with Croquet code rapidly following. There are some videos of RAP in action in SL and Squeak in the meantime. Stay tuned!

Interoperability video

In Second Life, there’s BlogHUD with is really cool and you can coax the built-in Firefox engine used in the help system to let you navigate the web, but with Croquet Collaborative, I can right now today use Firefox directly to post to this blog. It’s not surprisingly slower and some keys like backspace and arrow(all) don’t seem to work right under OS/X but still it’s fun to play with!

Update: I actually started blogging in world back in 2003 - the first I am aware of.

See Griotvision video

There’s a very nice realtime art installation entitled Igrishe which demonstrates some advantages of Croquet.

I’ll be doing a series of posts on Croquet Collaborative soon but this Subsystem Overview may be helpful.

Croquet Consortium links here!

Evidence that if you build it they will come

A new release of the SDK is on the horizon. It appears that the Croquet Consortium is now officially the focal point, replacing the old Open Croquet site Viewpoints Research had. Viewpoints is busy reinventing programming but there’s a build based on the new SDK release which anyone can download and play with at Croquet Collaborative. It’s not Second Life(yet) but you don’t have to be a programmer to use it.