Croquet 2 Play

This project seems like a good place for Croquet 2 play.

An interesting group of people using both platforms.

Although Second Life has some significant architectural and operational issues, it has an established virtual currency economy, strong backing, huge mindshare and can arguably claim to be The World’s Biggest Programming Environment. The latter point is significant - there are a LOT of people and corporations who are choosing to spend significant amounts of time and money in Second Life and who will only switch if there’s a compelling reason.

With all due respect to the authors, Julian Lombardi’s comments and the original Why Second Life Won’t Get A Third article both leave out important information which ironically makes the strongest case for Croquet. The Linden Lab folk know far too well the constraints of their architecture but they also believe they can scale because they are moving away from their highly centralized model towards something more distributed - a page out of the book of Croquet. The new second life grid architecture is evolving in a reasonably open manner(see alsoDavid Jones Notes from OOPSLA). While it won’t ever be as elegant as Croquet, it will address enough of the problems to keep growing the base particularly as the business model shifts to leverage the economic infrastructure. Unless Croquet greatly expands it’s niche, it won’t become a means of creating serious alternatives to Second Life. I believe however that it can and will. In 2008, I expect we’ll see some evidence of Worldbase + Interactivity Server architecture I’ve pointed out before.

Croquet and Second Life have shared avatars, now Croquet and Ogoglio are sharing avatars - this is good!

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

Now that Second Life has more than a million members, it would appear that their idea of a “metaverse” has taken root. However, I think that Meshverse is a more appropriate term for the virtual world paradigm than Metaverse. Consequently, I am shifting my generic new paradigm posting to the Meshverse and confining this blog’s focus to Croquet specific topics. It’s intersting to note that when the Croquet 1.0 SDK appeared in April of this year, SL had about a hundred-fifty thousand members most of whom laughed at critics from the Croquet community. Now that their community has quadrupled and the product significantly improved, they don’t even pay attention. For all it’s shortcomings, SL is filling a vacuum that Croquet hasn’t. That said, I still see Croquet having a big impact over time because SL is greatly constrained by their architecture IMO - nobody likes the frequent client updates and grid downtime. So I am continuing to actively work with Croquet albeit slowly so I don’t expect to post here very often for the coming weeks or longer.

Simon Spartalian (SL’s Simon Jezebel) is a Chicago art student who has introduced a service that lets Second Life residents produce real-life versions of their in-world objects, possessions or selves.

3pointD.com » Blog Archive » The Value of Translating the Virtual to the Real

Actually I should say real in another way since the atoms that make up the bits of data stored and displayed by a computer are very real.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which oversees such well-known hotel brands as Sheraton, St. Regis and Westin, will launch its newest chain, Aloft, in the online society “Second Life” in September.In the brick-and-mortar realm, the plan is for the first Aloft inn to open sometime in 2008, catering to active, urban 30- to 50-year-olds. But the real-world lodge will be preceded by a 3D cyberversion designed to prompt feedback from virtual guests and help guide the earthbound endeavor.
“We think the SL world is a specific community of early adopters, of tech-savvy people who like to voice their opinions,” said Brian McGuinness, vice president of the Aloft Hotels brand.

Aloft will be the first hotel for “Second Life,” which has already incorporated businesses from Wells Fargo to Major League Baseball. Marc Schiller, CEO and founder of ElectricArtists 2.0, a marketing services company, approached Starwood two months ago with the idea of a virtual debut for Aloft. Starwood then purchased an island in “Second Life,” and construction began on the hotel a month ago.

Second Lifers get first look at new hotel chain | CNET News.com

There are several nice screenshots of Aloft.