MS-OLPC?

Nicholas Negroponte just posted the following announcement:

"One Laptop per Child is announcing an agreement with Microsoft
to make a dual boot, Linux/Windows, version of the XO laptop. In addition, our intention is to engage one or more third parties to port Sugar to run on Windows in order to reach a wider installed base of laptops. In the meanwhile, OLPC remains fully committed to our goal: a completely free and open learning platform for the world's children. The mission statement of OLPC has not changed in three years.

Sugar is the first user interface specifically designed for children and teachers to learn and collaborate, and remains central to our strategy. Broadening Sugar's reach to as many children as possible remains key to OLPC's mission.

To enable the Sugar environment to reach as many children as possible, particularly in the poorest areas of the world, OLPC must be able to bid on educational technology contracts, some of which require that Microsoft Windows be able to run on our hardware. The increased volumes will lower the XO-1's price, already lowest in the industry with capabilities no other laptop shares.

OLPC is substantially increasing its engineering resources and all software development continues entirely on GNU/Linux. We will continue to work to make Sugar on Linux the best possible platform for education and to invest in our expanding Linux deployments in Peru, Uruguay, Mexico and elsewhere.

No OLPC resources are going to porting Sugar to Microsoft Windows, although as a free software project, we encourage others to do so. The Sugar user interface is already available for Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions, greatly broadening Sugar's reach to the millions of existing Linux systems. We continue to solicit help from the free software community in these efforts. Additionally, the Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu software environments run on the XO-1, adding support for tens of thousands of free software applications.

Open Firmware V2, the free and open source BIOS, is now capable of running Linux, Microsoft Windows XP and other operating systems, and was developed by Firmworks with support from OLPC. This will enable dual boot of OLPC XO laptops with Microsoft Windows XP in addition to the existing Fedora-based system and will become the standard BIOS/bootloader for all XO systems when completed. With this "free BIOS," the XO-1 continues to be the most open laptop hardware currently
available."

For more information, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/AnnounceFAQ.

Machinimascope

Gamecaster is a new company that has developed a way to let you shoot 3D animation as if it were live action. This specialized capture technology called the Cybercam S3 was developed for use during broadcasts of video game competitions for sports games like Madden football and numerous combat titles. Using this device, camera operators are able to smoothly pan, tilt, truck, crane, and even zoom the camera lens within 3D virtual worlds in realtime.

Machinima 101

An introductory lesson about the video production technique known as machinima. The lesson was filmed entirely on location within the virtual world of San Andreas and was nominated for a Machinima Award at the 2007 Bitfilm Festival.

Googley Eye

Not that far from the truth.

Another Digital Rainout

Today, for the second time in as many weeks, Second Life became unavailable for the same reasons that 3rd party large-scale server-based architectures should not be relied on to support mission-critical virtual worlds in any serious way. The outage happened, once again, just at the time that Aaron Walsh of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative was trying to host a Second Life in-world meeting. Here is what Linden Lab had to say: Logins have temporarily been restricted to staff-only as Operations addresses a slowdown in the asset system. We’ve also broadcast a request in world for residents who are currently logged in to refrain from manipulating or transferring assets. We’ll have more info ASAP. Obviously, this company is in real trouble given the frequency of these problems in a system that so many have come to rely on....

More freeCAD in Croquet

A video of additional features being added to the freeCAD port to Croquet. This work is being done by Aik-Siong Koh and his students at Malaysia's Multimedia University. A tree view menu (to the left of the screen) presents a list of all the objects in the space and a specialized tool bar (to the right of the screen) allows objects to be scaled and rotated. Once the code for these features is cleaned up a bit more in the next weeks, it will be incorporated into Cobalt as enhanced functionality.

FreeCAD in Croquet

Aik-Siong Koh and other Malaysian programmers are developing an in-world 3D modeling tool for Croquet. As a first step, they are porting freeCAD into Croquet. freeCAD is a basic 3D CAD with advanced motion simulation capabilities. freeCAD was developed as a tool for teaching and learning geometry, kinematics, dynamics, vibrations, mechanisms, linkages, cams, machine design and physics. It offers users the ability to create and manipulate assemblies of simple 3D solids that can be connected by joints, constraints, contacts, motors, actuators, springs, dampers, forces, torques or gravity.

Since freeCAD is written in VisualWorks Smalltalk and OpenGL, Aik-Siong considered it to be a logical choice for developing a native CAD for Croquet. His first step is to duplicate all the capabilities of freeCAD inside Croquet. Following that, he and his team plan to develop a GUI to take advantage of the solid modeling and NURBS capabilities inside freeCAD. Ultimately, Aik-Siong and his colleagues hope that their port can enable the default in-world content creation tool for Croquet.

Digital Rainout

Today, Second Life became unavailable for the same reasons that 3rd party large-scale server-based architectures should not be relied on to support mission-critical virtual worlds in any serious way. The outage happened just at the time that Aaron Walsh of the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative was hosting a Second Life in-world meeting to discuss the status of Media Grid's Immersive Education Platform Ecosystem, Education Grid, and the baseline requirements for the next generation (aka "3rd generation") of Immersive Education platforms. On the schedule was a discussion of the Cobalt peer-to-peer approach to platform scalability. Ironically, we were unable to discuss scalable peer-to-peer architectures today because of the lack of scalability of Second Life.

Here is what Linden Lab had to say about the outage: "In order to increase overall stability of the grid today during peak usage hours, our operations team has disabled a set of in world functions to reduce overall database load and create a more reliable experience for everyone. As a side effect of these temporary changes, some group and avatar profile services will not be available." Perhaps a more reliable experience for someone - but certainly not us. Its a shame that a modest thirty or so people who were trying to get together in world for a scheduled event were unable to do so because of who-knows-what was happening somewhere else in Second Life. Why shouldn't a mere thirty people be able to just get together without having to rely on the vagaries or expense of some commercial server infrastructure or service? Why should everyone be tied to a single bottleneck infrastructure? I guess the answer is that we need to step up our efforts to bring Cobalt to beta!

Croquet Doodles

A wonderful collection of older and more recent Croquet demos created by David Faught.

Saving and Loading Spaces

A new build of Cobalt has just been made available download. Added functionality includes the ability to save and load spaces from web or local directories. This means that you can now make your custom Cobalt spaces available to others as a kind of template virtual world over the web!

Contributing to Cobalt

Right now there are four big ways you can contribute to Cobalt:

Software testing. The central place for tracking the state of Cobalt, feature additions, bug reports, and bugfixes is the Mantis bug tracker here. You'll first need to sign up here for a Mantis bug tracker account.

Content contributions. Contributions of artwork, motion capture files, meshes, textures, etc. should use the file upload feature of Mantis to include a files - or include a URL pointing to the contribution.

Code contributions. To contribute code, place a changeset in the monticello source code repository’s contributions area and then reference that changeset from an bug report in the Mantis bugtracker.

Hosting worlds. Given that Cobalt worlds are able to be saved as templates to ordinary web directories and then accessed by people using Cobalt from anywhere over the Internet, individuals can make an important contribution to the effort by either hosting world templates at their own URL, or by contributing .C3D templates to the project in the public domain. The very best worlds contributed to the Cobalt effort will be made available by Duke University through its Cobalt template directory (presently under development).

Please note that all software contributions to Cobalt must be made available under the Croquet license. All content contributions must be made available under either either the Croquet license or in the public domain. In submitting code or content, you are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. Please do not submit copyrighted work without permission.

Cobalt Released

Cobalt is an emerging open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application being built using the open source Croquet SDK. A pre-alpha build of the Cobalt application is being made freely available to the emerging virtual worlds community by Duke University and its partners under the Croquet license. We hope that by doing so, we will foster a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of education and research.

The current build of Cobalt is located here.

The Monticello source code repository for Cobalt is located here.

The Cobalt-specific Mantis bug tracker is located here.

Software testing and bug reporting is a very important contribution to the effort. Doing so will help the Cobalt development community to identify areas in need of programming and re-engineering. Well-written bug reports can be an especially useful contribution by non-developers who are interested in advancing this effort during these early stages of Cobalt development. We hope that many of the community's software developers will consider taking on bug fixes.

Mark McCahill will be coordinating updates and code contributions to Cobalt to ensure compatibility with the base classes within the present Croquet SDK. In this way we can ensure that Cobalt development does not create a fork from the Croquet SDK. The goal here is to build a Croquet-based application that end-users can really use and then to contribute the application back to the Croquet Consortium for distribution as part of a future Croquet release. We hope that by making the pre-alpha available we can tap into the creative potential of the broader community as a way of advancing something that all of us can freely use to create deeply collaborative, greatly featured, and widely interlinked virtual environments on a very large scale. Lets do it!

The Server Dilemma

The following quote from the article Second Earth (MIT Technology Review, July-August 2007) provides some interesting numbers around the server dilemma associated with server hosted virtual worlds such as Second Life:

This reimagining of the real world can go only so far, given current limitations on the growth of Linden Lab's server farm, the amount of bandwidth available to stream data to users, and the power of the graphics card in the average PC.

According to [Cory] Ondrejka [Linden Lab's now former CTO], Linden Lab must purchase and install more than 120 servers every week to keep up with all the new members pouring into Second Life, who increase the computational load by creating new objects and demanding their own slices of land. Each server at Linden Lab supports one to four "regions," 65,536-square-meter chunks of the Second Life environment--establishing the base topography, storing and rendering all inanimate objects, animating avatars, running scripts, and the like. This architecture is what makes it next to impossible to imagine re-creating a full-scale earth within Second Life, even at a low level of detail. At one region per server, simulating just the 29.2 percent of the planet's surface that's dry land would require 2.3 billion servers and 150 dedicated nuclear power plants to keep them running. It's the kind of system that "doesn't scale well," to use the jargon of information technology.

But then, Linden Lab's engineers never designed Second Life's back end to scale that way. Says Ondrejka, "We're not interested in 100 percent veracity or a true representation of static reality."

Croquet Skeletal Animation Part 2

Another example video of skeletal animation in Croquet.

Croquet Skeletal Animation Part 1

The Croquet team at the University of Minnesota, in collaboration with David Faught, is building a skeletal animation package that will be distributed as part of the next version of the Croquet SDK. They have been using this package internally for use in the Croquet-based proprietary language learning environment project called Croquetlandia (see previous post).

Sun's Wonderland

Project Wonderland is a new Java-based open source (Gnu GPL v2) toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Wonderland has many very powerful features that make it a potentially useful virtual machine-based platform for creating virtual worlds that organizations can rely on as places to conduct, as Sun says, "real business". Within Wonderland virtual worlds, users are able to communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, and can share live applications such as web browsers, OpenOffice documents, and games. This functionality is why Wonderland was recently chosen along with Second Life and Croquet as the immersive education platforms that will be receiving support from the Media Grid Institute. As with Second Life, Wonderland worlds are reliant on server infrastructures to support their basic use. By promoting the use of virtual worlds and giving away the client technology as open source, Sun is attempting to broadly increase demand for their servers. An interesting strategy...

Wii-mote Possibilities

Here is a clever video from Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon University showing how you can use a Nintendo Wii-mote and home-made infrared LED light pens to create a low cost multi-touch interactive whiteboard system.

A CNI Interview

Gerry Bayne recorded this 15 minute interview with me at The Coalition for Networked Information's 2007 Fall Task Force Meeting. CNI is dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about the important work that CNI is doing at their web site.

Why Second Life Won't Get a Third

Max Borders opines on what he views as the key differences between Second Life and Croquet. Another piece comparing the two technologies can be found here.

Croquet Selected!

This past weekend, it was announced at The Boston Media-Grid Summit that the Immersive Education Initiative (see article on the initiative's goals) has selected Croquet as one of three official "next generation" immersive education platforms. The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia companies, and foundations that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. The other two immersive education platforms selected were Sun's open source Project Wonderland client and the now open source Second Life client.

What this all means is that the open source Croquet platform's value will become better known and that the Immersive Education Initiative will now direct both funding and programming resources towards the development and deployment of open source Croquet technologies and open source Croquet-based educational applications. Selection criteria for this important honor included the following: 1) support for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems; 2) availability as open source code; 3) vendor-neutral client and server architectures (no vendor lock-in); 4) stable and reliable runtime implementations; 5) integrated text chat and voice chat; 6) high resolution graphics; 7) multi-user support for collaboration; 8) highly customizable avatars that support high resolution graphics and body animation (gestures); and 9) support for user-created content.

The event in Boston was an invitation-only affair hosted and sponsored by the Grid Institute, the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, and the City of Boston with participation from the Federation of American Scientists and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

A Croquet Spoof

Recently posted by David Faught. Happy New Year!

Immersive Touching

Immersive Touch is an augmented reality immersive system developed by Cristian J. Luciano, Greg Dawe, Pat Banerjee, and Lucian Florea at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Electronic Visualization Lab. It is among the first systems to integrate a haptic device with a head and hand tracking system and high resolution display. This makes it possible to maintain an overlap between the image and position of a haptic device. As you can see in the embedded video, users get a more realistic and natural way to interact in 3D objects in real time. This can be of great value as a way of training surgeons and other professionals who might well benefit from a little practice on a high-risk procedure. Imagine how Croquet could add a dimension of collaboration to such simulations....

Arts Metaverse Podcast

In this podcast from one of Educause's 2007 podcasting sessions, UBC's Ulrich Rauch (at right) provides an informed overview of how UBC's Ancient Spaces project got started and how his team is connecting the projects using Croquet as a way of establishing the Arts Metaverse immersive 3D platform and social network. You can also download an mp3 of the podcast here.

Touchy-Feely Croquet

UNC's Jeff VanDrimmelen has recently begun exploring ways to integrate haptic technology with Croquet virtual worlds. Haptic technology allows simulations to convey information to users in the form of mechanical stimulation. Haptic devices typically transmit information in the form of vibrations or motions, thereby creating a sense of touching or feeling virtual objects. The main types of haptic devices are 1) tactile feedback devices (that generate resistance to user input movement) and force feedback devices (that generate movement back to the input device).

The Novint Falcon device is a new haptic device developed for use as a gaming peripheral and input device. The user interacts with a small knob with three degrees of freedom in movement at the front of what is otherwise a stationary desktop device. The knob is attached to the main body via three multi-hinged and motorized arms. The step motors within the arms feel what the user is doing as well as apply forces back to the knob.



Jeff recently posted this video about his earliest effort to integrate the Novint Falcon haptic device with Croquet technology.

Duke Receives Mellon Award

Today, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Duke University a $100,000 prize for leadership and development work to advance Croquet in the open source. The prize was one of ten presented as part of the second annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC) which are given each year to not‐for‐profit organizations for leadership in the collaborative development of open source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities.



The award was presented at the Fall Task Force meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington D.C. by Sir Timothy Berners‐Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the inventor of the World Wide Web. Duke’s MATC award was one of three that received the top prize of $100,000. The other award winners received prizes of $50,000 each. Award recipients were selected by the MATC Award Committee, which included Berners‐Lee, Mitchell Baker (CEO, Mozilla Corporation), John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corp.), Vinton G. Cerf (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google, Inc.), John Gage (Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office, Sun Microsystems, Inc.), and Tim O’Reilly (Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media).

A New Logo

I thought it was time for a change.

Croquelandia

The University of Minnesota Croquet team led by Julie Sykes and Liz Wendland has developed a Croquet-based collaborative simulation of visiting another culture and using another language. It was developed as part of a grant to use Croquet as a teaching tool for Spanish Language Pragmatics. The simulation provides learners with a place to gain knowledge and practice language skills in a safe and non-threatening environment. Within this simulation they call Croquelandia, learners are able to collaborate with other learners or even native language speakers within the context of the world. The video trailer was filmed entirely on location in Croquelandia and edited by one of the multi-talented undergrad programmers at the U of M.

A Croquet Winter Wonderland

It has emerged as a type of practice here in the United States for people to begin putting up holiday decorations on the weekend after our annual Thanksgiving celebration. In keeping with this, I offer this link to a new video from the folks at EduSim. In this one, they use a projected Croquet space in combination with a very compact eBeam input device that converts any surface (in this case a regular wall) into an interactive surface. The result is an on demand and relatively low cost interactive white board solution ($800-900 US) that, in combination with a data projector ($600-2,500 US) and Croquet software (free), may represent the beginnings of an economical alternative to traditional in-classroom visual communication boards (the typical front-of-the-classroom whiteboard/bulletin board installation is comparable in price). Could this be the earliest manifestation of a new form of broadly available classroom media for K-12?

Squeak by Example

Croquet is written in Squeak, a modern open-source development environment for the classic Smalltalk-80 programming language (the first purely object-oriented language and environment). Squeak was used because Croquet required a number of capabilities that could only be provided by a true late bound, message sending language. Croquet's relationship to Squeak gives Croquet the property of a purely object-oriented system. This has allowed for some significant flexibility in the design and the nature of the protocols and architectures that have been developed for Croquet.

An essential property of Squeak is its ability to keep the system running while testing and making changes. Squeak allows even major changes to be performed incrementally and within a mere fraction of a second. Another key feature is Squeak's generalized storage allocator and garbage collector that is efficient in real-time so that animations and dynamic media of many kinds can be played while the garbage collector is collecting. It also allows reshaping of objects to be done safely. This is important to the creation and delivery of media rich collaborative virtual environments.

Early on in the project, a Java-based Croquet was considered. However, that approach was abandoned because Java lacks needed meta facilities. In many ways Squeak/Smalltalk is still far ahead of its successors in promoting a vision of an environment where everything is an object, and anything can change at run-time. This is an important property for virtual environments that are deeply flexible and modifiable as an immediate result of the actions people take within those environments. Still, the lack of significant corporate backing and marketing muscle behind Squeak/Smalltalk has meant that less capable technologies are the ones with which most of today's developers are most familiar.

To help more people get familiar with Squeak's very powerful programming environment, the new book Squeak by Example is now being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. It's intended for both students and developers and guides readers through the Squeak language and development environment by means of a series of examples and exercises. This is very useful to those who wish to become more familiar with the Croquet programming environment. You can either download the PDF for free, or you can buy a softcover copy from lulu.com.

Connecting Beyond the LAN

Tim Wang recently posted an explanation of how to use the present Croquet SDK to connect with other Croquet peers outside of a local area network.

Avatars in First Life

This video illustrates what real life might be like if we were limited to the avatar capabilities/interactions presently available in virtual worlds such as Second Life. It very much underscores the limitations in the ways we are able to represent ourselves within today's 3D gaming and chat environments. If we are going to leverage virtual environments to support interactions between people, then we need far better ways of representing ourselves within them. Our representations should ideally be able to project as fully as possible the broadest range of human cues and capabilities. Clearly, 3D virtual worlds have a long way to go in this regard. As a first step, we need to get past the dress-up doll house metaphor that appears to have emerged for interaction within these environments.

The static avatars presently made available as placeholders in the Croquet SDK are far less capable than those of Second Life. Still, the Croquet SDK offers developers an opportunity to change whatever they need about the way people are represented with virtual environments. Opportunities for avatar experimentation are huge. Just imagine avatars that contain action triggers, link buttons, or even multiple on-board virtual environments. The possibilities through Croquet are as limitless as the imaginations brought to bear on the problem (and of course the resources expended in implementing them). The flexibility and efficiency of the Croquet programming environment gives researchers and other creatives far more capability in exploring how best to represent presence in virtual environments than is available with today's commercial 3D world technologies.

I should point out that all of the .mdl avatars that the Croquet SDK now uses actually came from an early version of the Alice project and from Squeak's Wonderland. However, the Croquet team at the University of Minnesota is working on some nicer avatars that will likely be made available in the next version of the Croquet SDK. A preview of the Minnesota avatars can be seen briefly on the Croquet video in a previous post. Also, Matt Schmidt and his team in Missouri are also beginning to experiment with avatar improvements and it will be interesting to see what they come up with.

What's in a Game?

"If game sounds frivolous, call it a simulation. If simulation sounds too stuffy or expensive, call it a game."

- William Horton, E-Learning by Design (2006)

RENCI Joins the Consortium!

I am pleased to announce that the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) recently joined the Croquet Consortium. RENCI is a major collaborative venture of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University. Supported by the state of North Carolina, RENCI focuses on finding solutions to complex, multidisciplinary problems. The institute is a virtual organization that includes facilities at the three Triangle universities, East Carolina University, and the University of North Carolina Asheville. RENCI's mission is to bring together scientists, technology experts, educators, artists, humanists and business and government leaders to address today’s most challenging multidisciplinary problems. By applying technological expertise and the world’s best computing, networking and data resources to these issues, RENCI strives to lead the effort to create a collaborative 21st-century problem solving environment designed to spur economic growth and lead to the next generation of transformative discoveries.

Imagining the Internet

Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast is a multi-section online resource containing thousands of pages. It contains predictive pronouncements about the future of humankind drawn from thousands of people from every corner of the world - people from the past and from the present - experts and non-experts alike. The site is made possible by The Elon University/Pew Internet Project and is intended to expose future possibilities while simultaneously providing a peek back at the past. The site was conceived, developed, edited and maintained by Janna Quitney Anderson, an assistant professor at Elon University and director of Internet projects at Elon University's School of Communications.