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Socio-computational systems, virtual environments, learning contexts, and the Cobalt Project
About Me
- Julian Lombardi
- Metaverse architect, assistant vice president Duke University's Office of Information Technology, senior research scholar with Duke University's program in Information Science + Information Studies, and adjunct faculty member with Duke University's Department of Computer Science.
What is Cobalt?
Cobalt is an open source virtual world browser and construction toolkit application being developed at Duke University. Cobalt makes it possible for people to easily create, publish, access, and participate in a network of linked virtual worlds. Currently in pre-alpha and built using the Croquet open source software development platform, Cobalt uses peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers and makes it very simple to create and share secure virtual worlds that run on all major operating systems.
4 comments:
Very very interesting. Are all the capabilities in the video found in the released version of Croquet SDK? Animated avatars seems new (man stretching his leg). When would the next release be?
All the best,
Aik-Siong Koh
Great to see you posting again!
I like how it describes a bit about what Croquet does and brief examples of how. Perhaps another video could answer "who?", "where?", "when?", and "why?".
I keep wanting to refine my elevator pitch to answer "why?".
Current ideas:
- Papert's "Mathland" for math fluency - by practice, immersion... or learning about any abstract domain in the same way.
- B.I.M. - Building Intelligence Modeling. Modern construction is so complex with so many people involved and so dynamic in day to day changes over such a long time... that simulations are the only way to keep that much information current for everyone over a wide geographic area to be informed including costs, resource locations, and worker allocation.
- "Holodeck" as a new literary form.
- Simulations teach "powerful ideas" such as "system dynamics" where learners deal with a large amount of variables which still lets them explore the domain and multiple possibilities and futures.
- Croquet allows different organizations' different simulations interact with each other.
- Alan Kay's point that the purpose of computers parallels the purpose of science to make visible the invisible properties and dynamics of the world around us. Creative, interactive, archivable, searchable, multimedia maps of such domains can best be represented by 3D simulations (in most cases) and are more personal and persuasive than just text, charts, photos, and movies alone.
- etc.
Amazing!!!
I love Smalltalk...
Julian, THANK YOU for posting this. It is challenging to communicate what Croquet is to people who have no prior knowledge of virtual worlds, collaborative spaces, etc. This video will be very helpful when I'm trying to explain the research project I'm trying to get off the ground.
That being said, I'm curious why the video does not illustrate with any real depth the notion of "deep" collaboration in a collaborative 3D virtual world. Was this intentional?
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