Croquet 2 Play

Millions of Us
For the metaverse to be interesting, it must be physical and that has a hard cost attached to it. Today, we do this by adding machines, but I can see it moving to a model where people host their own machines.

I don’t see any reference to Croquet on this site(yet) but it’s another piece of handwriting on the wall.

Online spaces: The new frontier | CNET News.com
On Thursday, there were more than a dozen venture capitalists in the room, a clear sign that investors are looking at virtual worlds as real opportunities to make money.

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Some here argued that the view of virtual worlds as potentially profitable ventures makes a conference like this much more attractive than it could have been even a year ago.
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While virtual-worlds enthusiasts acknowledge that MySpace and its ilk aren’t games, and aren’t virtual worlds the way that “WoW,” “EverQuest,” “Second Life” and others are, they do feel that the sense of community developed through virtual spaces means there are more similarities than many would think.

Steiger said that he’d like to see the spectrum of virtual worlds–”Second Life,” “WoW,” MySpace and so forth–move closer together by adding tools on each side that can give users more choices, more ability to interact on meaningful three-dimensional levels and more social-networking elements.

The more the tools, the greater the flexibility people will find in virtual worlds. That’s important, Ito suggested, because such flexibility could give people the scope to engage in complex interactions regardless of whether they feel like going questing in a game like “WoW,” hanging out in “Second Life” or having simple text chats as they can with instant messaging.

All of this adds up to a significant window of opportunity for Croquet. However, the Net abhors a vacuum and if Croquet developers don’t fill the building(pun intended) demand, others will.

The Savvy Technologist » Blog Archive » Minnebar: Mark McCahill on virtual worlds
Can you imagine meeting for a professional development session somewhere in a virtual world?

Yes. Mark McCahill covers a lot of ground here and as a knowledgeable Second Life citizen provides some valuable comparisons between Croquet and Second Life. One really interesting point he makes is that :

“Second Life is the poster child for if you didn’t think that through properly, you’re probably going to be in a world of trouble.”

Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger » Wow: 3D operating system, Open Croquet
We’re getting a demo of Croquet from Julian Lombardi and David Smith of Open Croquet, which is a 3D world. Something like Second Life, but runs P2P.

We have just seen a new world.

Want to know what’ll be happening in the metaverse in a decade’s time? A group of metaversal thinkers (myself included) will get together in California next month to start hacking out their vision of what might come to pass. The Metaverse Roadmap is a project of the Acceleration Studies Foundation that will seek to come up with “a 10-year scenario, possibility, and challenge document for the development of the 3D Web” and related 3pointD technologies (including massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds like Second Life, social software and Web 2.0 apps, among other things). [Press release.] It promises to be a heady event, with participants including Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Esther Dyson, Randy Farmer of Yahoo! and John Hanke of Google Earth, among others.

Turn Left At The Metaverse

What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When your avatar becomes your blog, your desktop, and your online agent?
Metaverse Roadmap: Pathways to the 3D Web

Increasingly, we have it within our reach to become a movement of future-makers.
What are the available tools for making better futures?

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Future-making

CCSE: Test screenshot from CCSE.

This is very interesting - reminds me of the kind of thinking Gibson first inspired in the late ’80’s - early 90’s VR stuff. Books like Cyberspace : First Steps and movies like The Lawnmower Man and Disclosure have some interesting visualization ideas that you just couldn’t play with very cheaply back then.

“Audiences are demanding greater depth of content and more creative ways of storytelling,”

Hit television series ‘Lost’ inspires global online game - Apr. 26, 2006

In time this will translate into the need for more powerful software and a more flexible and scalable web.