Croquet 2 Play

I’m most pleased to report (although somewhat belatedly) that HP (Hewlett-Packard) has joined the Croquet Consortium as a founding member and that HP Labs’ Rick McGeer is serving on our growing Board of Directors.

Julian Lombardi’s Blog: HP Joins the Consortium!

Matthew Schmidt has provided a nice intro to launching a Croquet world programmatically. If you found it helpful you may want to view(or review) these pages from the Croquet Consortium site while waiting for his next installment:

• Getting Started: Starting Croquet
• Programming: Simple World

If you’re itching for more right now, you might try to understand what the quick and dirty path has in common with the route taken by Simple World. To do that you need to find out where and how the SimpleWorld class is used. Read more

The popular Biovision Hierarchy(BVH) used for many human avatars(Second Life for example) evolved in the context of motion capture and therefore isn’t usable for creating and animating other creatures. The folks at University of Minnesota have developed a more flexible skeletal animation framework suitable for modeling any type of skeleton. Very nice!

I agree with Peter Fisk’s idea

… that Croquet (like Smalltalk did before it) is showing us the future of human-computer interaction

but when he says

I don’t think that hundreds of millions of people are going to install Squeak on their computers.

I think he’s not factoring in that Croquet is a Smalltalk evolved meme whose influence isn’t measured in market-share but in mind-share. Peter actually demonstrates this meme factor in describing his project

Vista Smalltalk is an attempt to create an environment like Croquet using only widely deployed software components.

Read more

Several download sources are available from the Croquet Consortium site - congratulations!

Croquet Consortium links here!

Evidence that if you build it they will come