Sunday, June 08, 2008

NSF SGER


I've just been awarded an NSF Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) to advance exploratory work towards a more complete open source Croquet-based browser application and toolset that can support the large scale needs of the scientific community.  With this support, we will be helping to advance the Cobalt effort by 1) making general improvements to the user interface which includes the more complete buildout of Cobalt's menus as well as improvements to basic navigational control, 2) fully implementing and testing of the ability for end-users to tag and electronically store their Cobalt-created worlds to online directories, 3) designing and implementing methods for finding and contacting other users of Croquet spaces by leveraging XMPP/Jabber as a presence registration and rendezvous mechanism, and 4) designing and implementing of methods that enable Cobalt users to browse a directory of all registered and active Cobalt spaces and to make it possible for users to contact current participants of those spaces by leveraging XMPP/Jabber and institutional IAA infrastructures as a means of defining user permissions by group affiliations.  At the end of this, we hope to have a full Beta of the Cobalt application available for download to all.

4 comments:

RichWhite said...

Congrats .. this is exciting ... like the "Mosaic" moment for the 3D web !

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, Julian! Looking forward to Cobalt future updates!

Anonymous said...

Julian,

I'm interested in learning more about your plans for improving Cobalt's UI. I'm a school psychologist, so I'd like to see Cobalt be easy for the teachers I work with to use.

We have a couple of interactive whiteboards, so I'd also be interested in seeing how it fits in with EduSim, and how it might address accessibilty/universal design issues.

-Lynn

Peggy Sheehy said...

Very excited about your work and eagerly awaiting beta!