Julian Lombardi's Blog

Julian Lombardi's Blog Has Moved

2009-05-19T22:20:00.003-04:00

I've moved my blog to another address and will no longer post here. Please go to julianlombardi.blogspot.com to see all my posts, both old and new.

-Julian

Collaborative CAD in Cobalt!

2008-12-11T06:50:00.000-05:00

Thanks again to the work of Aik-Siong Koh and his team, Cobalt now makes it possible for users to work in a deeply collaborative CAD environment. This video shows how two Cobalt users on separate computers can work with relatively sophisticated CAD capabilities over a LAN. This newly-implemented collaborative CAD capability in Cobalt opens up a wide range of possibilities for engineers and others at a distance to develop sophisticated simulations and architectures in Cobalt worlds. The ability to develop animated content within a full-featured virtual world CAD environment sets Cobalt apart from other virtual world technologies in a very significant way.

VNC in Cobalt!

2008-11-22T08:16:00.000-05:00

Rajeev Lochan has just been successful in getting VNC to work within a shared Cobalt space! VNC is a graphical desktop sharing system which uses the RFB protocol to remotely control another computer. This is a big breakthrough for our open project. It means that a Cobalt-based VNC client can connect to a VNC server on any other operating system. Cobalt users will soon be able to view and interact with remote applications (including full featured web browsers) or even collaboratively access remote desktops within the Cobalt application. Because the VNC protocol can use a lot of bandwidth, we still have some optimization to deal with - but this progress is great to see. Thank you Rajeev!

Immersive Workspaces

2008-10-21T18:37:00.000-04:00

Linden Lab has announced that its now going to be moving into the enterprise 3D collaboration space. It recently announced a new product called "Immersive Workspaces" which is basically an area in Second Life set aside for corporate meetings. That more secure area represents "a completely exclusive and secure experience, with no connectivity to the Second Life mainland." Their intent is to develop a complete collaboration experience for the enterprise. I guess that is Linden Lab's attempt to try and ensure that business meetings are not disrupted by griefers or by unwelcome barrages of flying penises. Looks like the enterprise virtual worlds space is getting a bit more crowded. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

Another KMZ Import

2008-10-19T19:23:00.001-04:00

Another test of the new KMZ importer from Aik-Siong Koh. Note that the textures are mapping nicely onto the relatively complex model! Soon we will be able to import lots of content from Google's 3D Warehouse into Cobalt. That will be nice...

Strangely Attractive

2008-07-16T08:09:00.000-04:00

Matthew Chadwick has been exploring the creation of GPU-computed chaotic attractors of dynamical systems using the Croquet SDK. The code he is using is based on David Faught's procedural textures code. In this implementation, the cube to the left defines a parameter space for controlling the system. Matthew says that the same code he is developing could also be used for other things like in-world physics simulations. Matthew will make all of this available for public release once the code is ready.

Better Avatars!

2008-07-13T16:32:00.002-04:00

Better avatars for Cobalt are almost ready! Here is a video showing an early test implementation of a motion-cycle enhanced avatar in Cobalt. Peter Moore has been doing a wonderful job with this and in getting the Ogre3D XML importer to work with models developed in Maya or exported from Blender. That means that we will all soon have at least two art paths for getting avatars and other animated meshes into Cobalt worlds. It'll also be great to finally retire the stilted Alice and Rabbit avatars. This particular video also provides a sneak peak at some of the texture and environmental/directional lighting work that I hope to have make its way into the next update of the Cobalt code-base.

Croquet Simulation Work

2008-07-07T07:12:00.000-04:00

This new video by Willi Griephan of Bremen, Germany shows the operation of two Croquet simulation spaces that he created using the Croquet SDK. The first is a falling "Domino" simulation that leverages the Open Dynamics Engine for its physics. The second scene depicts swarm behavior in an aquarium simulation where two members of a swarm can pair, and by doing so, spawn new offspring. The Swarm algorithm that Willi used is described here by Craig W. Reynolds.

NSF SGER

2008-06-08T07:40:00.004-04:00

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.

MS-OLPC?

2008-05-16T08:08:00.001-04:00

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.

Another Digital Rainout

2008-04-25T21:05:00.001-04:00

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....

Saving and Loading Spaces

2008-03-17T20:47:00.000-04:00

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!

Cobalt Released

2008-03-04T18:35:00.001-05:00

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

2008-02-23T13:18:00.001-05:00

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

2008-02-17T10:43:00.001-05:00

Another example video of skeletal animation in Croquet.

Wii-mote Possibilities

2008-01-25T07:38:00.000-05:00

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.

Why Second Life Won't Get a Third

2008-01-17T20:24:00.000-05:00

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!

2008-01-13T07:09:00.000-05:00

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

2008-01-03T10:33:00.000-05:00

Recently posted by David Faught. Happy New Year!

Touchy-Feely Croquet

2007-12-21T22:20:00.000-05:00

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

2007-12-10T20:31:00.000-05:00

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 Croquet Winter Wonderland

2007-11-25T08:32:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-24T08:46:00.000-05:00

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.

Avatars in First Life

2007-11-17T09:53:00.000-05:00

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.

Building a Lesson in EduSim

2007-11-06T17:36:00.000-05:00

Here is another video tutorial developed by Rich White at the Greenbush EduSim project showing how to bring resources into an EduSim/Croquet world and how apply textures to those resources.

Tragedy in the Commons

2007-11-04T21:01:00.000-05:00

At sometime during the night of Monday, February 26, 2007 a group of republican Second Life users, some sporting "Bush '08" tags, vandalized the John Edwards Second Life HQ. Though amusing to some, this type of activity underscores the need for secure virtual spaces - not just spaces where anyone, dressed up as anything they wish, can go anywhere and do anything they want. Restrictions based on identity or group affiliation are particularly important for serious simulation-based educational and research environments. Click here for a more detailed view of the damage.

How Croquet is Different

2007-11-03T07:35:00.000-04:00

In recent months, more and more people have been asking me how Croquet is different from Second Life - thanks to all the media buzz around Second Life. Let me break it down this way: Croquet, as a software development environment, is more extensible than the development environments used to create collaborative worlds such as those in Second Life, and before that the unified metaverse of ViOS. These early server-based commercial approaches to establishing large-scale metaverses do not create computational environments that users/programmers can actually control - instead they must rely on constrained server-based computational environments to capture eyeballs for a variety of schemes to derive revenue for those who run the servers.

By contrast, Croquet makes it possible to develop any number of interlinked metaverses that can be deployed independently of a commercial authority or the constraints imposed by server-imposed resource limitations. The less cyberlibertarian of you may find value in the fact that Croquet can also be used by institutions to implement far more capable and flexible and controllable commercial systems than those of Second Life and before that ViOS.

Here are some additional points that distinguish Croquet from its predecessors/cohorts:

Croquet's users/developers may freely share, modify and view the source code of the entire system.
Croquet is platform and device independent.
Croquet's users/developers may freely share, modify and view the source code of the entire system.
Croquet provides a complete professional programming language, integrated development environment, and class library in every distributed, running participant’s copy.
Croquet-based worlds can be updated while the system is live and running.

Marginalia on Steroids

2007-10-31T06:22:00.000-04:00

Here is a video created by the Squeak-based Sophie-server project being done by a software architecture group at the University of Potsdam in Germany. It shows how a Sophie server-based technology can be used to enrich the way of reading books.

Sophie Server is a server application providing functionality to be used through Sophie Author, Sophie Reader, or even a Web browser. Sophie Server provides a home for all Sophie Books that exist in a shared networked environment, allowing users to search for, access, and contribute to them. The Sophie project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. See my earlier post for more information on the project.

As you can see in the video, Sophie is not just a tool to render traditional paper books for reading on a screen. Instead, the project goes way beyond the notion of eBooks by leveraging the deep interactive capabilities of your networked computer. Sophie is basically an easy-to-use digital media assembly tool which allows both you and others to combine images, text, video, and audio into a single multimedia document containing multiple layers of information. This approach promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people.

Making Martians with Croquet

2007-10-28T11:20:00.000-04:00

A nice video of kids making Martians with a Croquet-based interactive whiteboard application prototype. What I find exciting about this video is that through the power of this technology, these children are engaged in deeply creative, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative activity that involves art, science, and technology. These types of environments could be quite valuable as tools for engaging students in science and technology. Just imagine what a bunch of adults might do with this stuff...

The Importance of Being Obvious

2007-10-27T07:13:00.000-04:00

When giving demos, I'm often struck by how important it is for a good many people to see a full implementation of a graphically-rich Croquet environment. Apparently, it takes a built-out virtual space for many of them begin appreciating the potential of the underlying system. That's a shame, since the Croquet technology is not really about the content that you put into it. With the limited resources at our disposal, we've been focused on functionality rather than the eye candy.

Still, graphical elements such as richly textured models and other content within virtual worlds are important because they are the first things that people see - and connect with. Some popular 3D worlds such as Second Life are perhaps not as much about the capabilities of their enabling technology as they are about enabling access to content and social presence.

Like it or not, it is for the most part that graphical eye candy and elements of content that frame people's perception of the underlying technology. I consider such elements of any richly-rendered 3D world scene in Croquet to be merely content within a system having deep capabilities. Yet, the models and textures set the tone for the experience of discovering what Croquet is all about since they have the potential to provoke a deep emotional connection between the user and the simulation. When you think about it, the very best of the 2D web browser applications available today are of no value unless they are used as viewers of web content. In fact, regardless of how wonderful their inner workings, the best and worst of them would be of equally minor value to users.

To date, many of the models and textures made available in the Croquet SDK were borrowed from the Alice project, other content was thrown into the distribution with little consideration of quality - after all, our efforts have been centered around improving the underlying technology and not the content. However, now that we are building the first open applications with Croquet, you will be seeing a lot more and different content as examples in the distribution. I believe that once users can access spaces that other users have built, then the quality of content accessible via Croquet worlds will increase greatly through the dynamics of social software systems.

I'm hoping that readers of this blog would be interested in helping with this by making textured 3D content available to the Croquet project. Please email me if you are able and willing to create quality content and scenes that we could include as part of the next release of the Croquet SDK and future applications. Your participation in this exciting project would be most welcome.

Rubikubist Croquet

2007-10-26T00:12:00.000-04:00

Interesting video of a Croquet-based implementation of Erno Rubik's Magic Cube puzzle. It's amazing what can be done with the Croquet development environment and a little creativity. For solutions to the dastardly 3x3x3 cube, see Dan Brown's nicely narrated two part tutorial: Part 1, Part 2.

More Bad Predictions

2007-10-22T05:32:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's blog posting prompted me to once again make available (this time as an embedded video) this wonderful short film that was done for Red Hat by the folks at Capstrat, a strategic communications firm here in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Over the past ten years I have personally witnessed numerous declarations that "there is no real value to 3D user interfaces" and that virtual environments will "never be used beyond entertainment." I have also been admonished that "3D is frivolous" and that "everything you need to do with a computer can be done with 2D windowing interfaces just fine." At this time I won't identify the people who have said these things. Suffice it to say that they are all attributable to people who are well known in the information technology and venture capital world. You know who you are... ;)

Roadmapping the Metaverse?

2007-10-21T05:53:00.000-04:00

Last year, I had the opportunity to participate in the Metaverse Roadmapping Project. Sponsored by the Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) and its supporting partners, a group of distinguished industry leaders, technologists, analysts, and creatives were brought together at a summit in Palo Alto, California to provide insights and explore the virtual and 3D future of the World Wide Web in a first-of-its-kind cross-industry public foresight project. An overview of what resulted from this exercise can now be downloaded as the Metaverse Roadmap (MVR).

The roadmap documents basically seek to define an anticipation horizon of ten years (to 2017), a “longer-term” speculation horizon of twenty years (to 2025), and a charter to discover early indicators of significant developments ahead. Its really a filtered amalgam of the many diverse points of view expressed by those who were invited to the summit in combination with the collected results of several public and expert surveys, a few workshops and roundtables at major U.S. conferences, social meetups, and information collected via a public wiki.

The MVR comprises two documents, both are available at the MVR website. The first is a set of MVR Inputs which summarize key insights in 19 foresight categories. The second is a MVR Overview which synthesizes some (not all) of the MVR Inputs into a series of narratives to explain what the authors feel are important features of the change and opportunity ahead. The authors include John Smart (Acceleration Studies Foundation), Jamais Cascio (Open the Future), and Jerry Paffendorf (Electric Sheep Company).

I tend to be a bit skeptical that attempts to predict or roadmap the future of science and technology have any value beyond other than that of providing a form of entertainment for people who look back from the future. It's an especially bad idea to declare that something can't or won't be done. In the back of my mind are the many, and in some cases embarrassing, predictions that have missed the mark:

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876.

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" -- David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

"But what...is it good for?" -- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" -- Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

Perhaps Alan Kay is on the mark when he declares that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Wii Remote and Croquet: Part Deux

2007-10-20T00:01:00.000-04:00

Another video from UBC of Tim Wang's integration of a Wii remote with an iMac running Croquet.

Duke Honored

2007-10-18T02:14:00.000-04:00

Duke University recently made CIO Magazine's 2007 CIO 100 list for "IT departments that understand what makes their companies tick and IT leaders who can translate vision into reality." The award was specifically focused on the work done across our university to improve academic technology services. There are many very hard working people who are responsible for our inclusion in this list. It's most rewarding to work here at Duke with people that truly value innovation - and that have the courage, fortitude, and perseverance to make that innovation happen. You can read about the award here.

A Croquet Mars Colony Simulator

2007-10-17T07:50:00.000-04:00

A video of six kids collaboratively co-constructing a simulated colony on Mars using a Croquet-based EduSim 3D Smartboard application prototype running on both a networked smartboard and several personal computers. This work is being done by Rich White of the Greenbush Southeast Kansas Educational Service Center. I am told that the kids really engage with this.

The SDK is Not an App!

2007-10-14T10:30:00.000-04:00

The Croquet SDK (software developer's kit) can be used to develop metaverse applications - though it is not an application in itself. It's intended as a resource for serious developers who wish to build collaborative metaverse applications for education, research, industry and entertainment. It delivers a foundational infrastructure for creating persistent, interconnected and collaborative 3D virtual worlds. The SDK is not an application in itself - any more than Java is an application (see my previous post on this).

The examples included within the SDK should be thought of as working code and not as how-to's or applications in themselves. Still, I often get feedback from people that the user interface is too difficult or that the "application" doesn't make sense to non-developer end-users.

One of the challenges we face with this project is that the graphically-interesting 3D user interface and textured 'environments' included as examples within the Croquet SDK provide many people with the incorrect impression that these are traditional and end-user-useable applications intended as alternatives to commercial production-quality metaverse environments (many of the same people would never think of providing a Java software developers kit to an end-user as a way of evaluating a potential Java-based application's usability).

The Croquet SDK was released to make it possible for programmers to join forces to create compelling end-user applications. In my earlier posts, I talk about some of what is beginning to be created. There is much more in the pipeline and the members of the Croquet Consortium are now focused on building an open source 3D Croquet-space browser application based on the SDK. We are planning to have a version available in 2008.

Virtual World Interoperability

2007-10-13T09:37:00.000-04:00

There's been a lot of talk recently about the need for virtual world interoperability. By that I mean the ability for a character in one virtual world system to be able to enter another virtual world system and carry with it certain attributes and capabilities. For example, my Second Life persona, Imortega Lungu, might wish to leave the realms of SL and enter Everquest II to trade in 3D models that were previously bought with Linden Dollars in SL. The prospect of such trans-world commerce is apparently capturing the imagination of representatives from several large corporations because of the sense that money can be made if player identity can move from one virtual world service to another. Exactly how that would work and how value could be captured by the creators of those worlds remains unclear - but it's an interesting notion nonetheless.

This discussion is happening because today's virtual world technologies are for the most part a series of technologically-distinct walled gardens - a bit like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were before the advent of the web in the 80's and early 90's. The desire to have a single metaverse that binds together all of the emerging virtual world technologies is a dream shared by many. Such a unifying metaverse would be to 3D as the web was to 2D. It would also have the potential effect of rendering today's virtual world technologies obsolete in the way that early walled gardens were rendered obsolete by the emergence of NCSA's Mosaic web browser. The problem is that the equivalent of what Mosaic was to the web has yet to emerge for 3D virtual worlds. Until it does, there will be much talk around seeking interoperability, standardization, and integration of disparate virtual worlds. Unless there are good business cases for company's to let their virtual world users transcend the walls of their virtual walled gardens, there may be little progress toward the broad interoperability now being envisioned.

More Fun With Greenbush EduSim

2007-10-10T07:53:00.000-04:00

Here is another video demo by the folks at the Greenbush EduSim Project. In it you will see a full-featured in-world browser in action along with several other functionalities of the system including copy/paste functionality and a fractal terrain generator that was developed at The University of Minnesota. Nice music.

Croquet on a Smartboard

2007-10-07T12:59:00.000-04:00

The EduSim 3D Smartboard Application is a very cool Croquet-based white board being developed by Rich White of the Greenbush Southeast Kansas Educational Service Center. It's designed to provide educators and students with a way of linking 3D activities across multiple white boards by leveraging many of Croquet's existing capabilities. Greenbush is working to ensure that The Edusim is being developed with resource packs for the K-12 classroom. This is exactly the type of application that Croquet technology was designed to make possible. Kudos to Rich for helping to bring Croquet to the next level. The video says it all.

Cost of Simulations

2007-10-06T21:56:00.000-04:00

The production of simulation-based learning environments can be an incredibly expensive proposition. Some of my friends in the video game development business tell me that a typical lower quality video game that is designed for around forty hours of game-play will, at minimum, cost between $2-20M dollars to produce (the cost can be much greater for higher quality games). Now consider the potential costs of creating a high quality simulation-based learning environment that provides forty hours of instruction in the context of a richly rendered 3D virtual environment.

It would seem that the production costs of high quality simulation-based learning environments might stand in the way of a future where students could learn and interact within detailed and highly functional online worlds. After all, there aren't many institutions that can afford to pay $2-20M for production of an entire online course that would need to support support forty hours of engaging contact with simulation-based content. Clark Aldrich's very informative blog on serious games and simulations recently listed the costs of producing simulation-based learning environments. What Clark's list really underscores is that any widespread use of simulation-based learning environments over multiple courses will be a costly proposition unless we can leverage a different set of dynamics for their construction.

Branching story:
Simulation in which students make a series of decisions via a multiple choice interface to progress through and impact an event.

Custom short (Less than 10 minutes) (perpetual site license): $30K
Custom medium (Between 10 minutes and 30 minutes) (perpetual site license): $100K
Custom long (Between 30 minutes and 2 hours) (perpetual site license): $500K
Off-the-shelf short (per user): $30
Off-the-shelf medium (per user): $100
Off-the-shelf long (per user): $500

Interactive spreadsheet:
Simulation in which students typically try to impact critical metrics by allocating resources along competing categories and getting feedback of their decisions through graphs and charts.

Custom short (Less than 1 hour) (perpetual site license): $30K+
Custom medium (Between 1 hour and 4 hours) (perpetual site license): $100K+
Custom long (Between 4 and 8 hours) (perpetual site license): $500K+
Off-the-shelf short (per user): $30*
Off-the-shelf medium (per user): $100*
Off-the-shelf long (per user): $500*

Mini-game:
Small, easy-to-access game built to be simple and addictive, which often focuses on mastering an action and can provide awareness of more complicated issues.

Custom short (5 minutes) (perpetual site license): 10K
Custom medium (10 minutes) (perpetual site license): 15K
Custom long (30 minutes) (perpetual site license): $40K
Off-the-shelf short (per user): n/a
Off-the-shelf medium (per user): n/a
Off-the-shelf long (per user): n/a

Virtual labs:
A series of challenges/puzzles to be solved using on-screen representations of real-world objects and software

Custom short (30 minutes) (perpetual site license): $30K
Custom medium (1 hour)(perpetual site license): $75K
Custom long (4 hours)(perpetual site license): $150K
Off-the-shelf short (per user): $10
Off-the-shelf medium (per user): $30
Off-the-shelf long (per user): $100

Practiceware:
Real-time, often 3D sims that encourages participants to repeat actions in high fidelity situations until the skills become natural in the real-world counterpart

Custom short (1 hour)(perpetual site license): $100K+
Custom medium (5 hours) (perpetual site license): $500K+
Custom long (20 hours) (perpetual site license): $1M+
Off-the-shelf short (per user): $100*
Off-the-shelf medium (per user): $400*
Off-the-shelf long (per user): $1000*

+ plus cost of facilitation
* including cost of facilitation
---

Can the dynamics of open source social software solve the problem of high cost simulation production for education? I think that it can. All we need is the right tools and the collective will to use them. After all, the MediaWiki-based Wikipedia doesn't cost anyone much money at all (in 2006, Wikipedia's Internet hosting costs came to $189,631). The cost of Wikipedia's real value - that of its content - has been distributed across its many contributors. What we need to solve the cost problem for simulation-based learning is a good 3D wiki-like technology that could be used to "evolve" multi-authored and highly functional simulation-based learning environments at low institutional cost.

Bright Shiny Objects

2007-09-29T07:38:00.000-04:00

Space and place are really two very different concepts that are unfortunately often conflated by the designers of many of today's collaborative metaverses. Virtual spaces are representations of spaces in the real world, replete with mountains, trees, avatars, and other representations of real world artifacts. By contrast, virtual places are 3D user interfaces invested with meaning and function that need not be directly representational of anything in the real world. Open source software tools needed to create, deploy, and modify sophisticated and highly functional places are in increasing demand in education and industry. At the same time, design paradigms for such virtual places are still in their infancy.

Problem is that we don't presently have very many good models for the utility of highly-flexible 3D environments in support of productivity. Until then, many designers rely on using today's online gaming and entertainment applications as the models upon which to build their ideas. Most of the current batch of early 3D educational and productivity support environments run the risk of becoming too representational and game-like than is warranted. An effective argument can be made that representational environments are appropriate in support of game-based learning. However, not all learning or productivity support need be game-based.

With all the current publicity around online gaming and online 3D walled-gardens, the value of place is therefore too often overlooked - even by those who are entrusted with exploring the diversity of issues and solutions associated with the advent of emerging new media in support of education and industry. Bright shiny objects have a way of catching the eye and distracting ones attention...

This relevant link is from the YNNO Research blog in which YNNO researchers outline some very relevant differences between place and space that should be taken into account when designing collaborative 3D environments for work and education. YNNO, is a Dutch consultancy firm for innovative working which studies how innovation in workplace design, business process management and ICT tools can increase the productivity of today's knowledge workers.

A Croquet Demo Movie

2007-09-01T09:11:00.000-04:00

Mark McCahill at Duke

2007-03-29T08:40:00.000-04:00

I am quite pleased to announce that Mark McCahill is leaving the University of Minnesota for a position here at Duke University as our architect of e-learning and collaborative systems!

Mark has been developing and popularizing a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s. He will bring to Duke the benefits of his deep background and rich experiences in collaborative systems development, large scale information system development and deployment, and 3D visualization.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Mark took a job doing analytical chemistry and analyzing the results on the campus mainframe. In 1989, Mark led a team at the University of Minnesota that developed one of the the first popular Internet e-mail clients (POPmail) for the Macintosh (and later the PC).

In 1991, Mark led the original Internet Gopher development team and helped invent a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet. Internet Gopher's menu-based hypermedia paved the way for the popularization of the Web and was the de-facto standard for Internet information systems in the early-to-mid 1990s. In 1994-95 Mark's team developed GopherVR, a 3D user interface to Internet Gopherspace.

Working with other pioneers such as Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Alan Emtage and Peter J. Deutsch (creators of Archie) and Jon Postel, Mark was also involved in creating and codifing the standard for Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Most recently Mark has served as one of the six principal architects of the Croquet project and was instrumental in founding the Croquet Consortium.

I look forward to working closely with Mark as we apply the lessons learned from first generation Internet information systems to next generation collaborative systems including enterprise-integrated applications based on Croquet.

Changing Times

2007-03-21T08:00:00.000-04:00

In a recent Point of View article in The Chronicle Review, Cathy N. Davidson expresses her opinion on the Middlebury College History Department's recent snubbing of Wikipedia and why academic institutions can no longer ignore the changes that are being brought about by social software technologies and the types of creative dynamics they enable. The issues discussed in Cathy's piece have relevance to social collaborative tools such as wikis and the types of co-constructed knowledge spaces that Croquet-based educational environments make possible.

Today's co-constructed 3D environments provide us with the potential to disseminate ideas as visual and dynamic objects in the way that text-based facts and ideas are constructed and disseminated via today's Wikipedia. This capability will have a profound effect on the academic world in that it has the potential to fundamentally change to how we communicate and learn. The changing legitimacy of Wikipedia is only the tip of the iceberg. The advent of social software and self-regulating large-scale group dynamics stands to challenge traditional models of instruction, authorship, copyright, and the value of static auteur-generated scholarly works.

Metaverse Scalability

2007-03-12T19:33:00.000-04:00

Back in the mid-1990s, while we were designing ViOS as a large-scale commercial server-dependent and massively-multiuser metaverse application, I was deeply concerned that its success as a widely-used platform would be its undoing. Thats because, unlike the web, multi-user immersive environments require relatively constant interactions between clients and servers - and those interactions don't scale well for large numbers of users.

Virtual environments such as multi-user flight simulators and first-person shooters rely on many independent server sessions that are limited to a relatively few users at any one time. Massively multi-user metaverses, on the other hand, require the client to be updated as fast as things happen within the environment. This means that large-scale metaverses need a lot of horsepower in the server layer since every move and every action of every avatar must be conveyed to every client. This puts a tremendous load on a few servers for even the most trivial of interactions. The approach simply doesn't scale to support the widespread global information systems that the Croquet architecture is being designed to make possible.

Our strategy back at ViOS, Inc. was to simply re-tune the system and put up more servers as the loads increased - hoping for the best. That approach would work well for Intranet applications that serviced relatively small numbers of clients. It even worked well for ViOS' initial user base of around 15,000 unique users. Problem was that once we had several thousand simultaneous Viosians tooling about in the landscape, they began to overload our interactivity servers, resulting in performance problems and service interruptions. Since there wasn't a lot of cash flow or investment capital during the 2001 post dot-com financial downdraft, we were unable to add servers at a rate that could meet the demand. If we had, it might have led to another few years of success for the ViOS metaverse platform - but sooner or later we would have been brought down by fundamental flaws in our approach as a bottlenecked client-server based architecture.

The Croquet technology has been developed with these lessons in mind. It is designed to scale in support of interconnected multiverses of millions of users without the need for any dedicated server infrastructure. Croquet's architecture makes it possible to develop metaverse applications in which, anyone can freely put up content in islands of any size, interlink those islands with any number of other islands, and control access to those islands.

By contrast Second Life makes money by controlling who can create islands and how those islands are linked to each other. It also has a very similar technical architecture to that of ViOS - a vintage twentieth century client-server architecture with with single points of failure, inertia, and control. It's been interesting to watch Linden Lab's struggle with the inevitable technical problems faced by Second Life as a result of its recent popularity, constrained architecture, and non-scaling technical approach. For details on some of those struggles click here, here, and here.

Metaverse Interoperability

2007-03-04T08:34:00.000-05:00

For some time now, Laurence Rozier has been developing a message format that, among other things, can allow for interoperability between metaverse environments. Called Remote Actions Packets (RAP), it basically makes it possible for someone to do something in, say, Second Life and have that same action replicated in Croquet - and vice versa. RAP messages consist of an actor identifier, an action name, and an encoded list of stage directions.

In this simple video, you will see a Croquet window (on the right) side by side with a Second Life window (on the left). Each shows a live running world containing a simple cube. When the cube in Second Life is clicked, a script runs that causes the cube to move. Almost immediately, you will see this action replicated in the Croquet world. Next, a Croquet menu select initiates a move of the cube in the Croquet window. After a short delay, the simple cube movement is mirrored in Second Life.

The implications of Laurence's work are that Croquet worlds can now be made to mirror aspects of Second Life worlds - and vice versa. This also means that there's now a way by which actions taken within metaverses such as Croquet can be logged to text files. That particular capability would be of great importance to educators, researchers, and marketers who are interested in understanding what kinds of things have taken place in Croquet environments.

Sophie

2007-03-01T22:06:00.000-05:00

Sophie is new open source Squeak Smalltalk-based software application for creating digital multimedia books that are easy to build. A product of the Institute for the Future of the Book, It is in essence a multimedia authoring system. Sophie-generated books can resemble regular books containing text and pictures, or they may also contain video, audio clips, images in a slide show, other books, links out to the web, and allow for reader interaction.

Sound a lot like what the web was supposed to be? You bet. The difference is that Sophie has been developed as a tool to enable non-technical people to assemble digital documents without needing to learn complex computer languages or to rely on programmers. Still, Sophie uses a human-readable distributed XML format to ensure that a user's content remain accessible for decades to come. Should a particular title need features beyond those provided by Sophie (such as performance or databasing) there is little in the way of preventing those systems from being plugged in on a per book or per distribution basis.

The intent of Sophie is to facilitate the shift from page to screen as a means of scholarly communication. Many academics find it difficult to move to the digital medium because of the technical barriers to doing so in a sophisticated manner. That has a lot to do with why the Research in Information Technology Program of the the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts chose to fund this project.

Sophie is device and OS independent - and best of all, because of its implementation in Squeak, it is fundamentally compatible as a powerful tool within Croquet-based immersive environments. In fact, we are currently exploring what it might take to combine these powerful technologies into a single application and in so doing, bring to bear the power of distributed multimedia authoring directly into late-binding and device-independent collaborative immersive environments - kind of like a powerful open source groupware solution with 3D capabilities. To bring these technologies together would be of great value to education and beyond - and would represent an excellent choice for our developing communities. :)

Sophie is available here, and a video demo is here (the demo starts at: 23:32).

A CIO Insight

2007-02-20T22:07:00.000-05:00

Alan Kay was recently interviewed for CIO Insight magazine's Expert Voices feature. In this piece entitled Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now, Alan discusses the mindsets that stand in the way of real innovation - and what his not-for-profit VPRI is doing to address the issue. In the article, Alan defines Croquet as one of those efforts and as "a new way of doing an operating system, or as a layer over TCP/IP that automatically coordinates dynamic objects over the entire Internet in real time. This coordination is done efficiently enough so that people with just their computers, and no other central server, can work in the same virtual shared space in real time."

Laying the Foundations

2007-02-05T10:21:00.000-05:00

Given the relative public silence around the Croquet project in recent months, I've been getting lots of emails asking about what's been happening since last Spring's Beta release. Well, there's been a lot going on. Several of us have been hard at work developing the foundations for a larger and more inclusive public effort around the project. With the transitioning to Croquet 1.0, we are in the process of setting up a not-for-profit corporation to house the open source project. The corporation will provide the governance structure required to ensure that continued development of the open source technology and that local Croquet development efforts receive the support they need from a self-sustaining and growing community of peers.

On the technology side, there are many dedicated people who have also been hard at work debugging and hardening the system for its move out of Beta. For this, special thanks need to go to Howard Stearns, Mark P. McCahill and his team at Minnesota, David A. Smith, Andreas Raab, Joshua Gargus, Ed Boyce, and Dan Fakken, for doing what needed doing. We are now testing and working on documentation and our efforts are coming to a point where the silence will soon be broken.

Very soon...

2006-04-17T19:26:00.000-04:00

The version 1.0 release of the Croquet SDK is imminent!

Working Hedgehog

2006-01-25T09:33:00.000-05:00

The upcoming version 1.0 release of Croquet has been code named "Hedgehog". I know that many of you have been waiting for news of its release date. The committee has been working hard to make it publicly available early this year - part of the reason that things have appeared so very quiet on the blogs and user's forum. The silence is the sound of intense work. We (actually mostly Andreas and David) are debugging the code and Mark and I are working with the Wisconsin and Minnesota teams to prepare a download package for eventual publication on the Croquet Project website.

Hedgehog constitutes a major enhancement and, in some cases, reworking of the core system. Important changes have to do with the following concepts:

Islands and their replication
Routers/controllers with time-based replication
Joining
Capability facets
Overlay portals
Ghost objects
Incorporation of Tweak
Modifications to the graphics engine
Use of 3.8 Squeak

Many of these new features have already been discussed in papers presented at the OOPSLA 2005 conference. These topics will also be discussed by David Smith and Andreas Raab at the upcoming C5 conference to be held this week at Berkeley. The really good news is that all of these are functioning in the present snapshot. Now its a question of debugging.

I regret that we are unable to announce a precise release date at this time. Nor is the committee able to provide any support for the open source system once it is released (we all have day jobs). That is to be the role of the Croquet Consortium - presently being organized at the C5 meeting in Berkely. The idea behind the consortium is to move the project from a relatively closed group of people developing open source software to a broad based community effort to develop an open source system backed by a not-for-profit community-led organization. This will be a significant and much needed development for the project. That will be the topic of my next post....

Floor It!

2006-01-10T09:37:00.000-05:00

Want to make a floor? Well, then see #makeFloor:fileName: and it's callers for examples of making a floor.

The photo is one that I took of the floor of the Sistine Chapel - one of the world's most under-appreciated works of art.

The Unauthorized Tutorials

2006-01-09T16:02:00.000-05:00

In an online posting, the Brazilian programmer Américo Damasceno reminded me that the best way to learn something is to try and teach it. Américo certainly took this assertion to heart and decided that the best way for him to learn Croquet technology was to prepare a series of three of step-by-step online tutorials on Croquet and Squeak programming. The first of these is an Introduction to Basic Croquet Programming. The second is called Basic 3D Programming in Croquet. The third is a Step-by-Step Tutorial on Squeak 3.6.

In addition to the undoubted benefit that Américo has received by putting them together, many folks have told me that they can be quite useful and informative to those who wish to get started with Croquet (production value not withstanding). I know that there are a lot of readers of this blog who are programmers interested in getting their feet wet with the system. My advice to you is to walk through these tutirials as a way to begin exploring programming approaches in Croquet (that is, until someone prepares official tutorials for the v1.0 release). For those of you who are not programmers, there is a solution currently being developed that allows users to develop meaningful and interactive content in Croquet worlds without the need to program the system. It is code-named Brie. More on that in a future posting...

Please keep in mind that Américo's tutorials are based on the Jasmine developer's preview of Croquet and much of what they contain may not apply to v1.0 (which includes some very fundamental differences from the Jasmine developer's preview). Nonetheless, I direct people there since some programmers will unoubtedly find the tutorials very useful. Thanks to Américo for providing the emerging community with this valuable resource!

Presenting Croquet

2005-12-19T20:11:00.000-05:00

Last October, Preston Austin and I gave a presentation on the Croquet Project at an event sponsored by Accelerate Madison, a premier Wisconsin-based networking and business support organization focused on information technology issues. Fortunately, the organizers arranged to record the entire presentation and make it available to anyone via Webcast. The Webcast includes the full program and presentation including video, audio and visual graphics. Its one of the only resources on the web that can provide you with view of Croquet technology in action. Click here to view the October 13th, 2005 presentation.

The Devil Made Me, DoIT!

2005-11-01T00:16:00.000-05:00

I am pleased to announce that I have resigned my position as Assistant Director with UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology (DoIT) in order to accept the position of Assistant Vice President for Academic Services and Technology Support wth Duke University's Office of Information Technology. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) is the primary central infrastructure and service provider of information technologies for Duke University. The organization provides a broad range of services, spanning the areas of networking, telecommunications, central computing facilities, enterprise systems, education and research support, general computing support, and security. In this new position, I have broad responsibilities for Duke's academic and research computing development and support efforts as well as all customer service functions of Duke's Office of Information Technology. I will also be working with others on the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI), a major instructional technology program focused on experimentation, development, and implementation of digital technology in academic environments and will be seeking to build Duke University's capability to develop, deploy, and support Croquet-based solutions for higher education in partnership with the newly forming Croquet Consortium. I am jazzed about the possibilities!

Apple Hill Learning Lab

2005-09-03T22:01:00.000-04:00

Each year, Alan Kay brings a group of people together at the Apple Hill Center for the Performing Arts in the beautiful mountains of southern New Hampshire. This three-day event in August provides invitees with an opportunity to spend quality time interacting with one another. The group includes technologists, designers, artists, musicians, in the tradition of other north-eastern creative retreats (Yaddo, etc.). The event also features great food and great music (by the Apple Hill Chamber Players). As I reflect back on my experiences at Apple Hill, I am struck by the deep importance of the contextualized social presence that occurs there and the positive effect that it has in support of creativity among the participants. Bringing people together in a way that allows serendipitous social interactions to take place is a wonderful way of stimulating collaborative creativity - and at Apple Hill, it really does work. There is lots of group interaction and lots of one-on-ones. Hopefully, Croquet will provide a technological framework for extending the value of such contextualized social presence into online spaces. The success of doing so depends on how well applications are designed and built on the core technology of the Croquet SDK. Until then, Apple Hill will have to do ;) . This year's event was particularly interesting because of the presence there of many folks who are working on hardware and software for Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop Initiative and on the final stages of the Croquet 1.0 SDK.

Critical 3D

2005-08-26T08:23:00.000-04:00

The Croquet development team at the University of Wisconsin is now beginning work on a six month pilot project to demonstrate instructional potential of a Croquet-based learning environment. The project involves partnering between our group and Michael Connors, a professor in the Department of Art at the UW School of Education, to develop authoring tools that allow the instructor to create an instructional environment to address critical barriers involved with the art critique process and provide students with means to upload, share, and critique their art projects within collaborative online spaces. The goals of critique in art are to remove individual perceptual barriers, develop an appreciation of how others perceive one's work, to overcome biases related to psycho-social conditioning, and develop skills of articulation and critical discourse. We are hoping that this project will lead to the development of generalized Croquet-based authoring tools that can be adapted to many different curricula, such as those in Law, Sociology, Psychology, Guidance, Business Management, Medicine, etc..

Pay For Play

2005-07-15T21:21:00.000-04:00

Many players of MMORPGs don't realize that some players are actually paying people in India to run up their character's status. For about $30 US you can advance your character significantly. This form of "cheating" shows that social status is, to some, even more important than game play. It may be interesting to recall that hiring someone to assume your identity and have them go into battle for you was something done by conscription-evading aristocrats during the American Civil War. Now, for a modest fee, you can hire a worker in India to go into virtual battle on your behalf. Some of you might ask why players wouldn't just enjoy getting there on their own - after all, isn't that the point of playing the game? It may be that the existence of this form of 'cheat' indicates the importance of social status over game play as a primary motivator to those engaged in MMORPGs. This is a notion often overlooked by game researchers who tend to focus on issues of game play as primary motivators of user involvement. We have only begun to scratch the surface on understanding how powerful verifiable online social status can be and how it can be used to benefit online education.

A Second Life

2005-05-08T10:45:00.000-04:00

David Smith and I will be giving a virtual presentation on where the Croquet Project is heading at The Second Life Future Salon, a monthly mini-conference held within (but not affiliated with) Second Life. Our presentation on May 26th will be part of a larger discussion of innovation issues around digital worlds as well as wider technology, business, and social topics viewed through a digital worlds lens.

These screenshots are from the first of such SL Future Salons that took place last month. The way it works is that David and I will create an avatar, go into Second Life, give a 20-30 minute presentation via VOIP, and then do Q&A with the audience via text chat. Should be fun! I hope that may of you readers will join us there (by there I mean Second Life ;) ).

Audio from the first of such Salons available here.

Croquet on Macs

2005-04-24T09:39:00.000-04:00

I've recently been asked to join the steering committee for Apple Computer's newly forming Mac Learning Enterprise. Along with other committee members from the New Media Consortium, NYU, Simon Frasier University, Rice University, UCLA, University of Michigan, and MIT (among others), the Mac Learning Enterprise community is intended to be a resource for educators, technologists, IT professionals, developers and change agents who are transforming education through innovation built on open standards.

The community seeks to document and share its experiences, expertise, and knowledge about implementing and deploying open source learning infrastructure solutions that can run on, or be integrated with, Apple technology. In addition to growing the community's knowledge base, members of the Mac Learning Enterprise community will provide feedback to Apple product and engineering managers so that they may improve functionality, performance, and integration across various Apple technologies, tools, and applications in support of open source software. Several working groups are now being convened to explore solution stacks and tools associated with the implementation of collaborative learning environments. At this time, Apple has identified technology implementations and deployments of Croquet, OSPI, OKI, and Sakai to be of primary interest.

It is great to see that Apple is now taking such an interest in Croquet and that the company is supporting the inclusion of Croquet as part of its effort to support the development of innovative open source solutions for learning enterprises.

A Croquet Bricolage?

2005-04-22T22:29:00.000-04:00

OK, I'm just going to "throw this out there" and see what other people think - Could this idea from Claude Lévi-Strauss' The Savage Mind (The University of Chicago Press 1966 [1962]) have any bearing on the approach to our project or the approach of those who might most use Croquet? Well, I suspect it might. But I'm interested in hearing what others mights say...

"The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. The set of the 'bricoleur's' means cannot therefore be defined in terms of a project (which would presuppose besides, that, as in the case of the engineer, there were, at least in theory, as many sets of tools and materials or 'instrumental sets', as there are different kinds of projects). It is to be defined only by its potential use or, putting this another way and in the language of the 'bricoleur' himself, because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that 'they may always come in handy'. Such elements are specialized up to a point, sufficiently for the 'bricoleur' not to need the equipment and knowledge of all trades and professions, but not enough for each of them to have only one definite and determinate use. They each represent a set of actual and possible relations; they are 'operators' but they can be used for any operations of the same type."

As usual, comments to this post would be most welcome!

Welcome Joshua!

2005-04-19T09:30:00.000-04:00

The UW-Madison has added yet another full-time Croquet developer. We are pleased to announce that Joshua Gargus, a highly experienced Squeak developer, will be bringing his deep skills and creativity to the Madison campus beginning May 9th. Joshua comes to us from PlayMotion where he was a lead developer involved in the design and implementation of a framework allowing applications to mix OpenGL and D3D, the developmnt of an OpenAL-based reactive sound engine, a vision re-calibration method for changing lighting conditions, and a unified XML configuration framework for all the company's applications. Prior to joining PlayMotion, Joshua was a research assistant at Georgia Tech where he worked on mo-cap (motion capture) and developed pen-based interfaces for use in animation. Joshua has also served as a contractor for Viewpoints Research where he worked on TrueType rendering of arbitrarily nested equations and developed EToys applications for Alan. We are excited to have a first-rate developer with such creativity and deep squeak experience join the team and contribute to the successful widespread adoption of Croquet. Welcome Joshua!

Standing on the Plateau

2005-04-15T23:24:00.000-04:00

Most every day I have the wonderful pleasure of being able to work with Marilyn May Lombardi. Marilyn is Senior Strategist for UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology, and in addition to enduring marriage to me for over 14 years, she is also a key member of the core Croquet team here at UW. Marilyn is presently working with our campus collaborators on several different aspects of the project. She has been working to design requirements for the use of Croquet in higher education settings and has also been working with some of our external partners and writing grant proposals to various agencies.

Based on her work with the project, Marilyn was recently invited by Dianna Oblinger, NLII's new director, to write both a short New Horizons Feature on Croquet's potential impact to higher education as well as a longer report on the same topic which will have the distinction of being the first of a series of research reports published by a newly redefined NLII. Here is the shorter version that appeared in the print edition of Educause Review:

Standing on the Plateau

By Marilyn May Lombardi

"Recently, I paid a visit to my university’s Web site, where I found a campus slideshow for prospective students. Similar slideshows and virtual tours are posted on many other college and university Web sites. These usually contain image after image of young people lounging, walking, eating, and laughing in sun-drenched settings across campus. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the students are sprawled on vast lawns in a perpetual summer: “a favorite place to study—and not to study.” They enjoy the lakeshore view from the student union terrace: “famous for its sights and sounds.” They take in the nightlife of downtown Madison: “No matter what time you walk down State Street, you’ll end up seeing someone you know. You’ll always run into someone different, someone new.”

Deeper into the slideshow, students are actually pictured at work, but not in classrooms or lecture halls. They stand outdoors, peering through land-surveying instruments: “the advantage of out-ofclass projects and research opportunities.” Or they gather around a computer terminal in an energetically cluttered laboratory: “Research at UW-Madison is a participatory venture, in which students and professors often work side by side.” And in one astounding shot taken through a fish-eye lens, the viewer peers down on an intrepid rock-climber as he reaches the top of a rather formidable campus wall. The quote that accompanies this photograph pretty much sums up the general outlook: “Most of the lessons we learn here are not from lecture halls, not from books. They are from our experiences in life.”

Through the medium of the campus itself, college and university communications offices are offering prospective students (and their parents) the promise of an experience. Institutions of higher education (particularly those with centralized campuses) promote themselves, first, as places with people. The physical campus sets up the enabling conditions for a complex social ecology to emerge over time. Large numbers of students engage in daily role-playing (also known as “critical thinking”), during which they “perform” a particular point of view—trying it on for size, explaining, critiquing, justifying, deepening, and reinforcing their understanding while strengthening their group identity. Ask anyone who has ever been through a rigorous program of study, and chances are he or she will remember learning more from fellow students than from professors.

The unique value of campus life, then, is a matter of proximity—the ability to position oneself in direct relation to relevant people and resources. The sociologist Erving Goffman called these spatially defined moments of engagement “focused gatherings” in which people are “engrossed in a common flow of activity and relating to one another in terms of that flow.” The gathering takes its form from the situation that evokes it, “the floor on which it is placed,” as Goffman put it.1 Add to this foundation the ready availability of tools to forcefully express, embody, and exchange ideas, and the campus has all the makings of one vast “collaboratory.”

Despite all this, we continue to design online learning environments that do little more than replicate the remoteness of a lecture hall. Clearly, any approach to online education that restricts itself to the delivery of pre-packaged content ignores the depth and social texture of campus life, along with the collaborative nature of learning. Of the three broad aims of higher education as identified by learning researchers—(1) skill acquisition and competence with tools and techniques; (2) socialization and induction into the canons of particular communities, professions, or disciplines; and (3) development of an intentional, or self-directed, approach to lifelong learning—current online learning environments are relatively successful in managing only the first, most transactional of goals.2

Meanwhile, we’ve reached a critical juncture in our institutional commitments to educational technology. Advances in networking and software design finally allow educators to do far more than merely automate the traditional lecture course. Over the last several years, higher education leaders have outfitted their campuses with fat pipelines and high-speed connectivity. Increasingly, their students come to campus equipped with the latest in commercially available PCs and laptops. Hard drives are bigger, graphics accelerators speed up 3D image display, and faster processing chips simulate real-world physics with relative ease.

At the same time, college and university open source software development projects are signaling dissatisfaction with commercial approaches to meeting pedagogical needs. A growing number of institutions with the capacity to build their own learning software are working to design applications suited to their individual requirements. Proprietary course management systems may have helped institutions leverage new media, but many in higher education feel these systems are making little headway when it comes to providing innovative technologies for real-time interactions among people, information, and systems. As one analyst concluded recently, “proprietary systems . . . seem to have hit an early plateau,” whereas “open source applications are standing on that plateau looking forward.”3

Standing on that plateau, looking forward, open source application developers are taking the time to consider what they would do differently if they were to design a new online learning environment today, knowing what they now know about the power of computing and networking technologies. For example, the members of the Croquet Project, a new open source initiative, are exploring what it would take to make online learning as personally involving, meaningful, and rewarding as campus-based learning. The project’s participants, who are coming together from around the world, believe that a transformative platform for online learning and teaching is finally within reach.

So, what is the Croquet Project? Imagine you are a graduate student in astronomy and have been asked to demonstrate your knowledge of Kepler’s Laws. You launch a software application on your computer and enter a three-dimensional online world. Inside this persistent environment, you use the drop-down menu to quickly design and deploy a dynamic simulation of the solar system. As your simulation runs, your professor enters the 3D online lab space and takes a closer look. Your professor downloads a file from his own hard drive into the virtual laboratory, and it appears inside a display window he just created with a click of the mouse. Remarkably, you and your professor are now able to see one another make additions and changes to the same document, all while keeping up a steady banter with the help of network-enabled telephony built into the software system. Impressed with your work, the professor invites his entire introductory astronomy class to a viewing and discussion of your simulation. From across campus, hundreds of students gather inside the virtual lab. The instructor’s video image (captured by the web camera on his laptop) is visible to the students he guides through the demonstration. Classmates wander among the planets, talking together in small groups, adjusting the timing and motion of the celestial machinery, annotating elements of the scene with comments or references, and gaining an unprecedented appreciation for Kepler’s Laws in action.

This vision of the future in computer-mediated education is driving the efforts of the open source Croquet Project. The project is designed specifically to make the most of advanced campus networks and the untapped computational resources of individual machines by enabling safe and secure cooperation— among machines, among user interfaces, among content developers, among users, and among institutions.

Croquet is the combined vision of its six core architects: David A. Smith, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Julian Lombardi, Mark P. McCahill, and the computer visionary Alan Kay. The winner of both the 2003 ACM Turing Award and the 2004 NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize, Kay is famous for his design of the now-familiar desktop metaphor for personal computing, as well as his object-oriented approach to computer programming. In some respects, the project is a way of fulfilling Kay’s abiding vision of the computer as a “meta-medium” and harnessing its full expressive power. Recognizing that little had changed since Kay introduced the overlapping windows interface thirty years ago, the Croquet team intends to provide a comparable computing standard for a new age of collaborative work and learning.

As of this writing, researchers and technologists from twenty universities have joined the higher education development effort, jointly spearheaded by the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota. This open source development community is working to ensure that the Croquet platform is able to address the special needs and concerns of higher education. Programmers and educational application developers interested in familiarizing themselves with the Croquet programming environment are welcome to download a developer’s preview of the technology from the Croquet Project Web site (http://croquetproject. org/). A more complete release of the Croquet technologies is planned to appear on the Croquet Web site later this year.

Higher education is moving closer to an online learning environment that captures the social vitality and collaborative spirit of the real-world campus. A growing open source community of learning researchers, software architects, visualization and simulation specialists, and user interface designers has taken up the challenge, lending their expertise to the Croquet Project. Such next-generation systems promise to extend the primary advantages of campus-based learning into the online realm, deepening and transforming the way we teach and learn.

Notes

1. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961), 9–10.

2. Kenneth A. Bruffee, Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

3. Christopher D. Coppola, “Will Open Source Software Unlock the Potential of eLearning?” elearning Dialogue, December 1, 2004.

Marilyn's longer twenty page report can be downloaded here.

Back from NLII

2005-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00

The NLII meeting in New Orleans was worthwhile and rewarding - and New Orleans is quite the place to be, even the week before Mardi Gras! Mark and I ended up staying right in the French Quarter and were quite unprepared for the level of revelry that takes place in the week preceeding the official Mardi Gras celebration. A pleasant surprise. The streets were filled all night with very loud and boisterous revelment (pardonnez mon français faible). Still, we were able to adequately rest up for the preconference Croquet presentation the next morning. ;)

At the preconference session, we met some key people in the higher education IT world. The response to Croquet was very positive, and we've now been invited to attend the Emerging Practices and Learning Technologies in Higher Education NLII Focus Session at Rice University on Mar 8-9, 2005 whose attendees will be exploring strategies for anticipating, evaluating and incorporating new and emerging information technologies on their campuses. This should provide valuable insights into how we might best approach the issues around deploying Croquet in higher education settings.

I am particularly gratified to read a Croquet-related blog posting from one of the attendees at the NLII preconference session. It appeared here. Here is an excerpt:

"...I don’t think I’ll ever need to eat again.

But I should really speak to the NLII annual meeting, and not just to the New Orleans milieu, although, well, whew, what a town. Appetite city.

As wonderful as the food has been, though, the intellectual feast has already topped it. The session on Croquet yesterday morning left me rubbing my eyes in near-disbelief as I witnessed a demonstration of a 3D recursive meta-environment in which people, places, and things can be placed in rich contexts that are themselves meaningful creations, often collaborative creations. I saw a landscape in which one could carry around a 3D “snapshot” of a space that was dynamically updated even as one carried it around. In short, I saw a model of individual cognition externalized, cognition networked with other minds in a social context that was compelling, fun, piquant, and a little mysterious. Imagine a Magritte painting that first becomes “real,” and then becomes a prompt that asks students to reconceive their own conceptual work in a course–together. It’s very difficult to explain, but once you see it in action, impossible to forget. I’ll never be satisfied with the desktop metaphor for computing again.

I do believe that Croquet is a way to bootstrap the Secret Society for Real School into the next key stage of its development. The first stage, an increasing dissatisfaction with a status quo in which education scales by means of an industrial model, is already upon us. That stage will end, I think, with some kind of popular revolt in which traditional schooling (traditional in the sense of what we’ve had for the last 100 years, not in the sense of, say, the Platonic Academy) will face crippling competition with other more compelling and convenient providers. I hope before we get to the end of that stage that the social and expertise contexts of real school will be freed from deadening 50-75 minute periods to explore its real potential as an ongoing conference devoted to, as Jerome Bruner put it, raising consciousness about the possibilities of communal mental experience. Subject areas, specific knowledge, even quizzes will still be part of the experience. But as with a good conference, the narrative that threads through the individual courses will continually inspire fresh perspectives–and a powerful sense of shared mission. A sense, finally, of occasion. Which brings Croquet back into the picture: the sense of occasion provided by that 3d object-oriented landscape, both dreamy and a little edgy, makes explicit the mental landscape we want our students to inhabit and, at last, build with us."

At the C5 Conference

2005-01-29T21:23:00.000-05:00

Well, most of the crew is here at the beautiful Granvia Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. Alan, David Smith, Andreas, and Mark are just down the hall. We are all taking a break in the midst of the Third International Conference on Creating, Connecting and Collaborating through Computing (C5 2005). This conference is emerging as the primary venue for those working with Croquet. It is intended as an international forum for the discussion and presentation of creative and collaborative environments among researchers, developers and users of collaboration technologies, learning environments, and object-oriented languages (especially Smalltalk, Squeak and Croquet). This year, there are a total of six papers that deal primarily with Croquet. Alan gave the keynote entitled "The ARPA Dream Revisited". Mark and I then gave our two papers on user interface approaches for higher education authoring/learning environments. Immediately afterwards, David Smith rocked our worlds with a demonstration of Filters and Tasks in Croquet. More on that in a future posting....

Croquet, Everyone?

2005-01-14T10:17:00.000-05:00

The following article written by Quentin Hardy and entitled "Croquet, Everyone?" just appeared in the technology section of Forbes Magazine's January 31st issue:

"Alan Kay, a legend in computing, thought it was time for something better. So he built it.

Thirty years ago Alan Kay oversaw the creation of many of the personal computer's clever innovations, among them windows, point-and-click file opening and networks. His lasting success irks him. "Except for the silicon, we've only gotten 5% of the potential of the PC revolution," he says.

Kay wants to take computing forward with his next great invention, an operating system that puts the user in a three-dimensional graphic world with scores of other users, all computing collaboratively and communicating through audio and visual messaging. Called Croquet, it runs on top of operating systems like Windows, Linux and Apple. Its innovation is in relocating the now-decades-old interface of windows and folders to a shared virtual world. You can landscape it any way you want, with mountain ranges, oceans or meeting rooms. Users become color icons or, if you'd rather, 3-D characters such as fish or bunnies. You zoom around in this rich, icon-filled space and call up digital photos, Web pages, science projects or PowerPoint presentations.

You can view and alter other users' files in one place, chat with those other users over the Internet and then move on to far-off objects and people, if they seem interesting. A budget report's graphics, say, might be made a figurative 10 feet tall, then changed by one user to reflect new sales data, then recolored by someone else for sharper resolution. You can do all this even if your Internet connection is a creaky-slow dial-up modem.

Croquet packs a lot of power for a little piece of software, one with but a single line of code for every 300 in Windows XP. Kay built Croquet with help from six crack programmers, funding it first with his own money and then through Hewlett-Packard's research labs, where he is a senior fellow. The total cost for the project, released for free last October, is less than $10 million, a drop in a Microsoft bucket. Says Kay: "Good math and small teams win."

In the 1970s Kay, now 64 years old, was an early member of Xerox's famous Palo Alto Research Center. Some of his inventions from that time, including an object-oriented programming language called Smalltalk, went into Croquet. He later worked on 3-D graphics at gamemaker Atari, compact computing systems at Apple Computer and easy-to-use interfaces at Disney.

Croquet comes as many institutions struggle with large, spread-out teams. The U.S. military is evaluating Croquet for training radio technicians to build field communications systems in virtual terrain replicating the landscape in Iraq. This spring the universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin will try Croquet for collaborative classroom labs. Intel, whose average employee is at any time on three different projects, is looking at Croquet as a way to make juggling work projects gamelike.

HP is playing Croquet by giving it away as an open-source project to build a user base quickly and to get an early read on what this sort of software will be useful for. "We don't get too focused on how to make money yet," says Patrick Scaglia, Kay's boss at HP. "We'll know within a couple of years. Good ideas take off rapidly, or they die.""

Elevator Pitches

2005-01-13T09:15:00.000-05:00

Elevator pitches are 30 second explanations of ideas. Croquet still needs a good one. Its not for lack of trying that we don't yet have a good one. This is because it is a very complex idea with many parts. What we probably need to do is tailor a set of pitches with each one oriented towards a particular audience type.

As noted earlier in this blog (Like an Elephant), the perception, if not value, of Croquet is very much different to different people. So, I thought it might be useful - and perhaps a bit entertaining - to have us use this blog as a way of collecting some elevator pitches from the members of our emerging community.

So here is the challenge: Please post to the comments what you believe to be an good elevator pitch for all or some aspect our project. It would be great if you would sign your contribution.

Should be interesting...

Dump the World Wide Web!

2005-01-12T09:06:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting excerpt from an article written by Bill Thompson that appeared on the www.opendemocracy.net website on December 23rd, 2004. What Thompson is saying has a good deal of relevance to what we are doing with Croquet. I will let the reader decide on where that relevance might be. Comments on this posting are particulary welcome.

"The World Wide Web is dead. Like a cartoon character running off a cliff but making it some way out into space before awareness brings gravity back into operation, it may continue to dominate our online lives a little longer, but its day is over.

Soon the whole clumsy, inadequate edifice will come crashing to the cyberspatial equivalent of the ground and we will look back upon the crazy decade from 1994 to 2004 for what it was – a dead-end in the development of the networked world.

The reasons are simple: the web, like many a political refugee, lacks a state. What’s worse, it doesn’t speak a language that will let it express anything more than basic requests for food, shelter or yet another poorly-resized JPEG image. Like all analogies this one breaks down pretty quickly if you scratch it too hard, but it’s worth keeping in mind during the (necessarily) more technical explanation you’re about to encounter.

It is important to understand how the web works. The web, like email, uses a “client-server” model. The client, in this case your browser, requests something – a web page – from a server. When a request is received, and assuming the parts are all there and the client has permission to take them, they are sent over the network by the server. It’s then up to the client to deal with them appropriately. In the case of a web page the elements will usually be a document written using HTML, the hypertext markup language, some image files and maybe extra bits and pieces. It is all very simple, and it’s made even simpler because the browser and the server communicate using a language of their very own called the Hypertext Transport Protocol, or HTTP.

The browser takes what it is given and displays it on your screen, laid out as prettily as it can manage. However once we want to do anything more complicated than display a page of text and graphics on a screen we rapidly discover that both HTML and HTTP are simply not up to the job.

The problems with HTML are serious but understandable. When Tim Berners-Lee created the web he wanted a simple text-based publishing tool for the high-energy physics community, and a simple markup language that let authors specify headings and link to other documents was fine.

But in 1993 two graduate students at a United States university decided they could improve on Tim’s work by writing a new browser which would display images too. In order to make this work they had to change HTML by adding the < IMG > tag – and they started a process of non-standard extensions which continues to this day.

The result is the mess we see today, where despite the best efforts of the standards bodies it is still necessary to write dozens of lines of code at the start of a web page in order to figure out which browser is in use, so that the “correct” version of the page can be sent over.

Present at the creation

It’s an appalling mess, but it wasn’t directly Tim’s fault. However the same cannot be said for HTTP, the protocol which allows browsers to ask for pages and servers to send them across the network. Here Tim’s desire for simplicity has led directly to our current problems, because he decided that the server should treat each request for a page from a browser as a separate transaction. The decision to make HTTP a “stateless” protocol has caused immense trouble. It’s rather like being served by a waiter with short-term memory loss: you can only order one course at a time because he will have forgotten your name, never mind your dessert order, by the time you’ve had your first spoonful of gazpacho.

Unfortunately many of the things that we want the web to do for us, from online shopping to having a newspaper that tailors its pages to our interests, rely on some degree of long-term interaction between client and server. Cookies, small data files that are placed on a client computer by the server, provide a partial solution, rather like the tattoos sported by Guy Pearce in the film Memento, but they are inelegant, complicated and far from reliable. As, indeed, the tattoos turn out to be.

We have spent the last decade fighting against the limitations of the web standards, extending, breaking, reinventing and compromising with them to the point where you can just about do online shopping, make pages look reasonably attractive and even offer personalised services.

But enough is enough. Just as it is sometimes necessary to demolish old buildings to make way for new, so it is time to move on from the web. It isn’t as if we need to look far for an alternative – we’ve had one since 1990 when the web was just starting to emerge from CERN physics lab. It’s called “distributed processing” and it enables programs to talk to each other in a far richer, more complex and more useful way than the web’s standards could ever support.

Had it not been for the rush to embrace the web’s page-based publishing model, choosing the simple solution over the right one, we would have proper distributed systems available today. Instead we have to invent technologies which preserve the web approach while making it slightly more usable, like the eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. Any tool that is too embarrassed even to use the first letter of its full name for an abbreviation is surely in trouble from the start.

Unusually for a company which is credited with following trends rather than creating them, Microsoft saw this first. They never liked the web and it was only the horrible realisation that every company, every net user and every competitor was going to invest a vast amount of money, effort and resources making it seem like it worked that forced Bill Gates to turn the company around and give it a web focus late in 1995.

At the time their programmers were just beginning to explore the possibility of direct programme-to-programme communication and network-based collaboration between applications. Without the distraction of the web we may well have had widespread distributed online services five or even more years ago.

These services would not rely on the Web browser as the single way of getting information from an online service, but would allow a wide range of different programs to work together over the network. We already accept that email, chat and even music sharing do not have to be Web-based, but we can go much further.

A news site could deliver text, images, audio and even video through a program designed for the purpose, instead of having to use a general-purpose browser, or a shopping site could build its own shopping cart and checkout that did nor rely on Web protocols. And we would have no need for Google, because information services would advertise their contents instead of having to be searched by inefficient ‘spiders’.

The web may have served a purpose once, giving net users something relatively simple to look at and use and convincing the world that being online was a good thing, but it has done so at great cost to the network’s architecture and has diverted research into usable, scalable and functional distributed systems for the last decade.

There is a deep need among the users for something better than the shoddy, half-baked hypertext publishing model that we geeks foolishly embraced back in the early 1990s. If we do not start delivering it the net itself will stumble, fail and eventually die away, trapped in this stateless web of deceit."

NICT/UW-UM Collaboration

2005-01-09T11:11:00.000-05:00

Our research groups at UW and UM have just entered into a collaborative research agreement with NICT (Japan's National Institute for Information and Communications Technology). The Croquet Committee is very pleased to have NICT recognize the potential of this new technology and to have them support important work in the development of Croquet. So, we are now off and running to achieve the following general objectives: 1) Adding user interface elements to Croquet for creating and retrieving annotations; 2) Adding support for importing and handling the placement of models and objects into Croquet environments; and 3) Developing user interfaces for allowing 3D content to be easily accessed from a digital repository or database and placed into a Croquet scene.

Developing this type of functionality for Croquet will go a long way in making it useful as a tool for education and training. The work is currently divided up into the following tasks which are scheduled to be completed this year:

1) Development of user interfaces for easy scene annotation in Croquet

• Researching and developing user interface conventions for adding notes to objects or locations within the 3D space (notes would be in the form of text, however, the technology will be developed in a way that supports video and audio annotations). Since all notes are themselves user-created objects within a scene, all notes may be added as annotations to existing authors' notes as well.
• Researching and developing tools to detect, view, and hide multiple authors' annotations. For example: a user should be able to view only the annotations that were made by a particular user or specified group of users.
• Researching and developing tools to define a path or course through a scene and identify selected annotations so that a tour of a scene and its annotations may be defined by one user and then followed by another user or groups of users.
• Researching and developing caching strategies to pre-fetch annotations and content when moving into a new region of a scene. For example: based on the user's position or level of authorization in the scene, the client would be able to dynamically fetch annotations that are not visible to other users lacking a similar position or level of authorization.

2) Development of graphical user interfaces for easily handling 3D objects

• Researching and developing the ability to import large and complex 3D models into a Croquet scene.
• Researching and developing a graphical user interface for rotating, moving, and magnifying objects in a Croquet scene.
• Researching and developing a graphical user interface for measuring, comparing, slicing, and moving objects between scenes (worlds).

3) Development of test content and capability of storing that content in a repository via the Croquet client

• Translation of existing open source/freely available sample content into appropriate format for implementation in Croquet spaces
• Creation of new (original) content for testing purposes
• Populating the digital repository (worldbase server) with new and translated content for testing purposes

4) Integration of annotations into a shared repository

• Developing a means by which users can be authenticated before allowing them to author content that can be promoted to the digital repository.
• Storing the author's annotations to a shared distributed repository
• Developing searching tools to locate author's contributions to the repository and to tag annotations with attributes/keywords so that the annotation repository can be searched on a number of attributes.

5) Making interaction with annotations an effective way of finding new information/viewpoints in a Croquet delivered environment

• Developing a means of automatically categorizing/cataloging annotations
• Developing a means of visualizing the difference/similarity among annotations
• Developing a way by which authors of annotations become notified when other users comment on, or further annotate, objects that the original authors have created.

In doing what's listed above, we'll obviously have to tackle some sticky technical problems. It should be fun and interesting. We hope that this work will also stimulate much thinking, problem solving, and code refinement across the larger development community.

Can You Say Shibboleth?

2005-01-08T09:04:00.000-05:00

Many of today's online environments and communities suffer from vulnerability to exploitation by those who seek to use the Internet's intrinsic anonymity to their own selfish advantage. Marketers, spies, and other unscrupulous Internet denizens have forced their way into private communities and email inboxes, disrupting the communities that they find - and sometimes even completely killing them. Those of us who have participated heavily in online communities over the years have lots of experience dealing with the imposters, forgers, and the ever-present anonymous cowards who can disrupt meanigful discourse or reduce it to a very low common denominator. Effective online educational environments must be efficiently insulated from such cruft. Here at UW we're looking into integrating federated identity management with Croquet. By doing so, Croquet users who use their own institutional login/password could access protected resources in Croquet places that are hosted by other institutions. The idea is that educational environments will benefit from people not being able to hide behind masks.

This is where the Shibboleth Project comes in. The project started in the late 1990s by Internet2 as a way of developing an open-source standards-based architecture that provides trusted, inter-institutional access to Web resources. It consists of an institutional Identity Provider component that authenticates users and provides trusted assertions about the user and a resource provider's Service Provider component which validates assertions and makes access control decisions about the user. Generally speaking, when an unidentified user attempts to access services, Shibboleth initiates a handshake between the Service and Identity Providers and allows the Identity Provider to create attribute assertions about the user without the Service Provider needing to keep track of the IDs of all potential users of the system.

Althogh it can get a bit freaky (as the above diagram suggests), this form of federated identity management permits the user's home institution to vouch for a users identity and provide a service provider with only the information necessary for a given session - an important way of protecting personal information, mitigating against identity theft, meeting FERPA and HIPPA requirements etc.. Integrating this now Web based system with Croquet would provide lots of benefits to educational and institutional uses of Croquet. Multiple insititutions (those with attribute repositories such as LDAP) could cooperate in creating restricted access learning environments in which students and educators from those institutions could interact and learn - without the need for each institution to set up an account for all the users of such spaces. A side benefit of this is that Fair Use limitation provisions on copyright laws would allow copyrightable materials to be distributed in such spaces - a feature that's really important to educators (and is probably one of the main reasons that academic institutions employ the use of cumbersome Course Management Systems over plain old websites, blogs, and wikis).

In case you're wondering, the word shibboleth refers to a kind of linguistic password: A way of speaking (a pronunciation, or the use of a particular expression) that identifies one as a member of an 'in' group. The term derives from the biblical story where two Semitic tribes, the Ephraimites and the Gileadites, have a great battle. The Gileadites defeat the Ephraimites, and set up a blockade to catch the fleeing Ephraimites. The sentries asked each person to say the word shibboleth (meaning 'ear of grain' or 'stream' depending on who you talk to). The Ephraimites, who had no sh sound in their language, pronounced the word with an s and were thereby unmasked as the enemy and slaughtered (and perhaps a few lisping Gileadites met their fate this way as well).

Like an Elephant

2004-12-27T09:15:00.000-05:00

Time and again many of the new people that I speak with about Croquet immediately (and most certainly prematurely) begin making comparisons between what they think we are trying to do with Croquet and the technologies and categories of technologies with which they are already familiar. With few exceptions, this happens long before they gain even a rudimentary understanding about what we are actually seeking to accomplish through the efforts of this project.

Of course, relating something new to something familiar is a natural way of dealing with what's new. Categories are comfortable. But they can spawn preconceptions or even prejudices that then stand in the way of one's ability to see what is most important or individually unique about a new thing. This is especially true when a large share of a new thing's value lies in the outcome of the interaction between its constituent parts. Emergent properties can have great value...

This is essentially the problem described in John Godfrey Saxe's (1816-1887) poetic version of the famous Indian legend known as The Blind Men and the Elephant in which each observer only perceives a part of the whole in a way that prevents a wholistic understanding of the animal and what it is capable of doing.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk
Cried, "Ho! what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me `tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up he spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope.
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Moral:

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Unfortunatly, the vision of what Croquet really is remains just a vision until we begin deploying a more mature networking technology and the framework of interactivity and worldbase servers as described in whitepapers on the project website. Words do it little justice. Trying to explain it is kind of like trying to describe the smell of coffee to a Martian with no earthly experience. As the character Morpheus in The Matrix puts it so well: "Unfortunately no one can be told what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself." This lack of experience with the whole is why so many are compelled to relate only to Croquet's consituent parts at the level of the categories with which they are already familiar.

Below I list below some of the typical comments that I hear from people who are new to Croquet. Notice the syntax - it's usually a statement of category followed by a reference to an existing product or approach. The reference part, usually in the form of a question, is for most people the result of a desire to be helpful.

"It's like an open source game engine - Oh, are you familiar with open source CrystalSpace or the Unreal engine and its mod capabilities?"

"It's like a 3D chat room - oh yea, have you checked out things like Second Life or Adobe Atmosphere?"

"It's like a 3D desktop - have you seen Sun's Project Looking Glass, its also a 3D desktop?"

"It's like a 3D learning space - have you gotten in touch with Active Worlds, they are building an Education Universe, aren't they?"

"It's like a collaboration suite - doesn't SharePoint do everything you are trying to do?"

"It's like a videoconferencing tool - gee, I thought NetMeeting already did that, have you looked into that?"

"It's like an operating system - I hear that Longhorn will be 3D and collaborative, right?"

"It's like a digital repository - so do you know about DSpace and the IMS specifications?"

"It's like a browser - do you use Mozilla source code and are you a member of W3C, after all, standards are important aren't they?"

"It's like a learning management system - Moodle and other commercial systems like WebCT and Blackboard do collabrative stuff, don't they?"

"It's a peer-to-peer technology - is it a file sharing program like Morpheus or KaZaA?"

"It's an integrated tool for collaboration, communication, and training - Macromedia Breeze does that, right?"

"It's like a 3D wiki - isn't there a...(then there is a long pause while they think about it)...hmmm...a real 3D wiki...now that would be cool!"

Just like the blind men and just like an elephant...

Picturing an Exhibition

2004-12-24T10:57:00.000-05:00

The Citris Gallery Builder is a Croquet-based collaborative virtual gallery construction and viewing tool for the humanities. Its one of several interactive collaboration tools for humanists being developed at Berkeley by Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy in collaboration with the students and staff of Citris. The Gallery Builder is being designed with the goal of allowing non-technical users to easily build 3D virtual galleries which contain images, movies, audio, and 3D objects of various types. The galleries are then able to be viewed and modified collaboratively by members of a Croquet place.

Building the gallery is done in a familiar 2D floorplan mode, where the user lays out walls and positions media on the walls or in the space via drag-and-drop capabilities from a content browser into the 2D view. The gallery is then also viewable in 3D. Ultimately, the team at Berekley hopes that this technology will contribute to promoting cooperative interaction between geographically distributed real-world sites through realistic reconstruction of those sites in virtual space in real-time. Special thanks to Orion Elenzil and Tao Starbow who braved the bleeding edge in rolling this out. We salute you!

Click here for more information about the Croquet-based Citris Gallery Builder.

Talking to Your TV

2004-12-23T08:10:00.000-05:00

"Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know." - Marvin Minksy

While visiting Japan last January, I saw a technology demostration that really captured my attention. Its called TVML (TVprogram Making Language) and it could very well change the way we relate to multimedia. It's a script description language being developed by Japanese researchers for use in producing full "TV programs" in real time virtual environments by using computer generated (CG) characters, a voice synthesizer, and familiar multimedia conventions. With this system a user should be able to dictate actions within a virtual space simply by generating a text-based script in real-time. In a TVML script, the contents and actions of a virtual space can be controlled by text-based commands such as "show title#1" or "character walk". The possibility of using voice-to-text capabilities makes this even more interesting. Written or spoken, TVML could be a very compelling way for people to script interactive virtual spaces and simulations using natural laguage approaches. It could also significantly lower the barrier to entry for a good many creative minds and allow for the rapid and low cost development of interactive virtual environments for entertainment, education, and training.

TVML was initially developed by R&D teams at NHK (Japanese Broadcasting Corporation), Hitachi Kokusai Electric Inc., Hitachi, Ltd., Central Research Laboratory, and Keio University. In 2001, the project moved entirely to the NHK where the effort is being led by Hayashi-san and his team and in collaboration with researchers at NICT (The National Institute for Information and Communications Technology). The good news is that they are now working to develop a TVML API and interface module for Croquet!

The first implementation of a TVML-emabled Croquet technology is intended for a Kyoto tourism information and support system. The idea is that a character will respond to tourists questions and guide them to points of interest in a virtual Kyoto. The virtual Kyoto will also be tied in with real-world locations and the technology is therefore being developed for use on multiple real-world display devices. Click here to learn more about TVML.

Random Acts

2004-12-19T11:50:00.000-05:00

We're working to come up with an approach to enable Croquet-based simulations involving ‘random’ events to be replicated on multiple machines. This is an interesting problem for us because of the fact that replication of computation would also replicate generation of the random numbers to be used in a simulation. This would usually be undesireable. For example, if we create a virtual coin toss simulation in Croquet that is intended to produce a random outcome (the outcome of either "heads" or "tails"), we would have to ensure that what might come up as “heads” on my instance is also “heads” on all other clients in the TeaParty. The problem is that if all of us are replicating the calculation of a random outcome, there would be nothing to ensure that what appears as “heads” on my machine would not be “tails” on yours. Solving this problem has deep implications on making the somewhat non-deterministic ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) integration with Croquet both deterministic and collaborative. Setting aside the obvious philosophical treatise that the act of structuring a form of deterministic randomness in cyberspace might warrant, we're presently considering two practical approaches to this issue.

One approach is to generate results on a master machine (the initiator of the event) and then replicating the random number computation (actually a pseudo-random number computation) on all other machines in the TeaParty (one machine simply tells all the other machines in the TeaParty that a new final result has been produced). In this way, when the triggering event or gesture happens on a particular machine, then that machine consults its own random number generator to produce a result. When the same event or gesture occurs on another machine, the random number generator on that machine is consulted to produce the result. For moderately complex simulations, there will be little guarantee of uniformity across ones that are moderately shared.

Another approach would be to get all participants to behave as if they are using the same random number generator. This would involve creating one random number generator that produces a well-distributed sequence of random values, regardless of which machine originates the request for any one of these values and the resulting sequence would be shared by all members of the TeaParty. In so doing, each request for the next random number would be shared as a TeaParty-wide event by all participating machines and no machine would be permitted to request an additional random number on its own that is not seen by all the other machines. This does not necessarily mean that there would be one generator for all purposes in all simulations running in the TeaParty. There could be one shared generator per ball in a billiards simulation, or one shared generator per billiard table in a simulation, or even one per TSpace. The point being that each of these shared generators is individually a single conceptual generator that is shared by all machines participating in the TeaParty.

User Centered Design

2004-11-21T09:21:00.000-05:00

To ensure success in designing ease of use and a level of design sophistication into the total user experience for Croquet-based learning applications, we're following the principles and best practices of user-centered design (as we do for all of our software development projects). This helps us provide for the needs of all potential users and adapt the user interface to meet their expectations, while at the same time freeing users from the need to overcome unnecessary obstacles to their use of the software.

In user centered design of educational applications you generally align learning objectives to user goals through a three-step iterative process: 1) information gathering and analysis, 2) information architeture and prototyping, and 3) interface design (implementation, testing, launching, growing). All three of these can (and should) be applied to any interactive software product.

User centered design also involves 1) making visible a series of navigational aids that readily define constraints and help users predict the effects of their actions, 2) reducing memory load by making interface elements meaningful and consistent and relating new items and functions to ones the user already knows, 3) providing immediate feedback when users perform actions, 4) facilitating the chunking of information into schema that are meaningful to users and that can allow them to skim and scan large amounts of data easily, 5) helping orient users by providing descriptive information about things, maps, and visual cues to location, 6) providing a high level of tolerance for user error, and 7) maintaining a high-quality visual design and text legibility. There are all pretty simple and basic - but you'd be surprised at how much software is developed without adequately considering some of these (but then again, a lot of you reading this probably wouldn't).

Welcome Howard!

2004-10-29T10:03:00.000-04:00

Howard Stearns has recently joined the UW Croquet development team as our full-time lead developer. Howard has 20 years experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. The CAD integration products he created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. Howard was Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Howard created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation. He has presented at technical conferences, been published by Dr. Dobbs Journal, and was on the board of the international Association of Lisp Users for five years. He has written extensive developer documentation as well as creating the XML systems to produce it. Howard has two degrees from M.I.T., and has also directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing. We are very excited to have him on the project!

Care to See a Menu?

2004-10-25T08:04:00.000-04:00

Croquet technology is so flexible that it can be used to develop any sort of graphical user interface that can be imagined. This presents a wonderful challenge for us as we tackle the task of defining the GUI for the first release of Croquet. However, does developing this new technology mean that we should also develop a completely different 3D GUI than the 2D ones we are currently accustomed to using? After all, what place do menus, pop-up panels, dialog boxes, and right-click menus have in a 3D collaborative space? At first glance, you might consider the development of a different type of GUI than the ones in our more traditional applications to be an appropriate thing for us to do first. From a personal perspective, it is what I would prefer to do. However, I am torn on this issue.

My experience as an educational technologist here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has taught me that getting anywhere near a majority people to explore and use new technology is harder than one might imagine. That is because it is not uncommon for most people to have considerable difficulty dealing with even the most subtle changes to how they are accustomed to using computers. Because of this, the University of Wisconsin-Madison commits significant resources toward helping its faculty and instructional staff transition to the use of new and emerging technologies that improve teaching and learning. And because of this, I also must consider that a simple and familiar GUI is what we must develop for the first release of Croquet. We must lower the barriers to entry as far as possible. Only then will we be able to harness the power of the creative commons in the manner we have described in our papers.

Since everything in Croquet is fully modifiable, it is possible for many different GUIs to be developed as applications are built. However, we still have to start somewhere. Here at UW we are designing and developing the first iteration of a simple and familiar default interface for Croquet v1.0. that can allow technologically naive people to quickly and easily access the power of the underlying technology. The idea is that, through a simple and familiar interface, educators and others will be able to access the power of Croquet easily and efficiently and develop collaborative learning environments and simulations (and with out the need to program in Squeak). In this way we will truly open up the power of this technology to the broadest collaborative user base at institutions of higher education. Once people have success with the system, they will then be able to then easily progress to deeper levels of scripting and programming. We hope that by developing an easy to use interface, we will stimulate the more rapid development of interesting, exciting, and useful exemplars. Just imagine what can happen when all kinds of subject area experts (not just programmers) can easily implement their ideas in Croquet spaces...

Looking Back on ViOS

2004-10-21T18:32:00.000-04:00

My efforts with ViOS have been mentioned in several of the previous postings. Since my experiences there are relevant to my work with Croquet, a bit of a description of ViOS is probably worth a mention now. The basic concept behind ViOS was to take the virtual world of the ENTIRE Internet and adapt it to a physical representation of large lanscape, complete with mountains, rivers and cities. I took this approach because of my belief that a virtual landscape resembling our physical world is more conducive to exploration and social interaction than the flat and abstracted world of the current page-based Internet. By organizing virtual cities and specialized regions with particular themes in a very large contiguous ViOS space, users could discover sites and people that they may never have found through conventional web surfing. Users were able to travel directly to cities/areas of interest through special 3D portals, maps, or by using a keyword. Objects within the ViOS world were essentially pointers to web-deliverable resources. When you interacted with such objects, you would bring up the webpage assoociated with it. ViOS information was therefore organized visually. We seeded the space with 420 cities and communities that appeared as 3D places. We populated these with approximately 15,000 objects representing the best of the web. Keep in mind that all existing web sites were still available at some place on the enormous landscape, but their location may not have been close to these initial communities. Also keep in mind that users could also just browse the web in traditional 2D browser-based ways as well.

Our business model was based on the desire for owners of such outlying sites to relocate their site's representation to “better” locations within ViOS in order to gain traffic to their sites (traffic that was measurable). We made it possible for a company to set up a site anywhere on the 3D landscape, whether it’s next to Yahoo, Amazon, Disney or all three. This was done by allowing them to lease locations through a pricing structure based on location and commercial density. In this way, the economics of location and commercial density could be transitioned to the online world because of its representation of a physical space. Private individuals could also publish to the ViOS lanscape at lower cost structures. A key concept of ViOS is that it enabled representations of internet-deliverable information to self-organize and optimize through the decentralized activities of its participants. In other words, owners of web sites could relocate objects pointing to their sites and thereby build meaningful communities. Such communities made it easy and enjoyable for users to explore specific areas of content and information while at the same time opening themselves up to the delights of serendipitous discovery within an ever changing landscape of people and resources.

A Lost Edu-Cause?

2004-10-20T15:36:00.000-04:00

Sometime last spring Mark McCahill and I submitted a proposal to debut Croquet at this October's EDUCAUSE conference in Denver Colorodo. We were turned down. That was a bit of a surprise since Mark and I were invited to present on Croquet as featured speakers in higher-education technology innovation at The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research's (ECAR) Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives sponsored by Hewlett-Packard on July 7-9, 2004 in Sedona, AZ. There we discussed the future of the Internet, planetary-scale network applications, and the application of Croquet as a social computing platform and tool set for use in higher education. The presentation was very warmly received by an audience that included EDUCAUSE executives who afterwards expressed their interest in the project. One of them even encouraged us to be sure to submit a presentation proposal for EDUCAUSE's next annual meeting and said that "the membership would really be interested in seeing this". So, we are left to ponder why the EDUCAUSE presentation review panel felt that a multi-institutional initiative with the scope and scale of Croquet would be of limited value to the larger membership of this leading academic IT organization. Mark is quick to point out that he has submitted five papers at EDUCAUSE over the past years and has never been rejected. Ironically, this year's EDUCAUSE did accept another proposal from Mark for a show and tell about a Squeak application that makes it easy to compose and update web forms with database backends. Check out Mark's abstract:
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"The University of Minnesota's Squeak FormBuilder application allows nontechnical users to create and modify database-driven multipage Web forms via a drag-and-drop user interface on a PC. The FormBuilder application automatically versions the form and updates the Web server, insulating the designer from the XML, XSLT, SQL, and HTML implementation details."
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So, the bottom line is that Mark and I are in Denver this week to do a number of informal and "under-the-radar" Croquet presentations at EDUCAUSE.

Meta Rules in Cyberspace?

2004-10-19T09:01:00.000-04:00

I just came across an interesting Croquet-related post on http://amsoapundit.blogspot.com. This is likely from someone I met in Washington D.C. earlier this year while giving an invited seminar at the Institute of Humane Studies, an organization that assists undergraduate and graduate students worldwide with an interest in individual liberty. It turns out that a former Accenture analyst, Max Borders, who was familiar with my earlier work at ViOS thought that the institute would find both my past and present work to be of interest. Now, if your anything like me, you might be wondering why a libertarian organization would be interested in hearing me talk about my work with ViOS and Croquet. Well, consider that the creation of "open" and globally scalable social computing spaces can cause some to ask the following: To what extent will we need to impose "rules" on peoples behaviors in such spaces? What types of "rules" are necessary? Who will come up with such "rules" and how will they be enforced? How can we find a balance between personal liberty and the need for regulating behaviors in "open" cyberspaces? All very interesting questions - and as it became clear to me during my seminar, they are especially so to libertarians. Here are some quotes from the posting:

"The future is here, and I've seen it. Today I met with Julian Lombardi, a director of technology of some sort at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A few years ago Lombardi ran a start-up, ViOS, that aimed to create a new way of navigating, creating, and accessing content on the internet. This is a pretty lame description. In fact, ViOS, and his newer, and much more robust Croquet system are new ways of living on the internet. Think Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash.

At its basic level, Croquet - a pre-Alpha version of which I saw demoed today - creates a new way of navigating the internet by creating a virtual world that can be populated by all kinds of content - from webpages (with static, audio, and video content) to avatars that represent users to objects that operate according to scripts.

Croquet is massively extensible and scalable - meaning it could eventually support billions of users creating billions of worlds. The worlds are huge - I do not know in detail the theoretical limits of world sizes, but since users can instantaneously create new worlds, there seems to be no practical limit. (Incidentally, some of this stuff is really metaphysically interesting. So what does it mean to have a virtual world that is essentially infinitely big, but also infinitely small - meaning that one can get from one point to another instantaneously? I don't know, but it makes meatspace seem a whole hell of a lot less attractive. Oh, also, scarcity in this world is going to be reputational and not linked to spatially-oriented issues as it is in the real world.)

Croquet allows virtual-real-life social interaction with voice-over-IP and the full range of content interaction that currently exists. Croquet is fully stateful and deploys a language called Squeak that is GUI-driven and allows even fairly unsophisticated users to create objects - from virtual buildings to animals to representations of physical objects - and share those objects in Domain Name Server-like servers around the world so that other users can use and modify existing objects to create even more complex features of the world.

Ok, so that's all very cool. Imagine if documents on the web were arranged spatially so that you could "walk" or "teleport" to a coordinate on this world to access documents AND around those resources would be resources offered by other people or organizations that appealed to you because of your shared interests. Ok cool enough.

But there's something even more fundamentally different about this technology and that is the ability for users - simple users, not corporations or governments - to create virtual worlds and exist within those virtual worlds and invite others into those virtual worlds and have those virtual worlds be only subject to the limitations of the technology and the RULES created by that owner. In other words, a fully privatized virtual space for every single user wherein every single user could establish the rules for social interaction within his or her world.

Why is this important? At a basic level, this technology allows us to test out rules of just conduct to find out which sets of institutions, norms, and rules operate most effectively online AND, by extension, in the real world. I can imagine social science, for instance, being made much more rigorous by testing out certain propositions about human interaction on humans, or at least, representations of them.

But at a more concrete level it makes the world(s) far more efficient. Let's imagine we have 10,000 worlds each created by 10,000 users (there could be many more). I create my own world which features very strict rules against blaspheming god. These rules require Avatars when they enter my world to pray to Jesus and to watch a video extolling the virtues of Southern Baptism. I forbid swearing, do not allow sex-oriented behavior or talk, and forbid the posting of advertisements in my world that are pro-choice.

My world, it turns out, is very popular for Christian homeschoolers because, in addition to having those rules, I also have featured lots of resources (much of it authored by other people, but filtered by me) for that audience. Other Christians in the real world find out about my world and, through some identifier akin to a domain name, know how to find it among the 10,000 other worlds out there. It's very popular among that audience. But curiously, metrosexuals find it all off-putting (incidentally, I realize metrosexual is so 2003). Fortunately for them, there are other worlds tailored to their tastes, preferences of social interaction, and so forth. If you can imagine such a world - all graphically sophisticated and easily modifiable by a fairly novice user - you can begin to see the power of Croquet.

Incidentally, authentication will be built into the croquet system which is essential to preventing abuse (worms etc.) and encouraging the development of social norms so that, for instance, the Christian world owner that I described above can exclude people from his world who violate his sets of rules. Croquet is stateful, meaning that your "connection" to the world persists. (On the web, your connection to a website does not persist. You request a webpage, your browser gets that page, and that's the end of the interaction. If you click on a link, your browser gets that page, but that second interaction is distinct from the first. Web technology attempts to mimic statefulness through the use of things like cookies that retain information about interactions, but it's a poor kludge)."

"This is super cool technology. One of the questions that Julian Lombardi had today was essentially about the kind of meta rules that ought to govern the worlds and the commons. My argument to him was that the meta rules should only be limited by the technology and that he should not, under any circumstances, limit the number of domain names. ICANN is a creation of corporations and government designed to limit our freedom on the web by liming the allocation of domain names and it is supremely inefficient, political, and authoritarian. But the internet didn't have to be that way - it's an artificial result of a failure of the initial designers to anticipate the popularity of the web and to fiat in 10,000 top-level-domains.

So my advice to Julian was:

1. Make sure people can be fully authenticated - allowing the evolution of social norms.
2. Allow people to fully create, share code, even code that essentially is not anticipated by the Smalltalk on which Croquet is based.
3. Allow full, exclusive ownership of worlds."

"I really do believe that Julian and his colleagues have done something truly remarkable and that 10 years from now when we're living in these world(s) virtually, we'll have him to thank. As for me, I'm going to learn Squeak, the high-level language that allows one to create experiences and objects in this new virtual world so that I can be ahead of the curve when the crush for the next generation of "web-designers" comes.

It was thrilling to see the technology. One of the disheartening aspects was that I have very little to contribute intellctually to a project like this. It seems to me that sufficiently interesting things have been written about the evolution of norms - by Hayek and others - about transaction costs and the unimportance of the initial distribution of "property" in the world - by Coase and others - and about existence in a world like this might be like (by Neal Stephenson).

This is really pie-in-the-sky, but could SUFFICENTLY meaningful social interactions in the virtual world make the real world somehow less contentious? In other words, if people can act out aggressions - real aggressions - in the virtual world, will they do that less or more in the real world? I don't think there's going to be a problem of people getting sucked into this virtual world - there's somethign about physical existence that can't be duplicated - but I do think it could profoundly alter how we interact with each other face-to-face." -amsoapundit

Video Avatars

2004-10-17T07:11:00.000-04:00

Another thing we're now working on is the integration of video into Croquet. Imagine doing away with the stilted and often silly avatars in the current build and replacing them with a video derived from the web cam of each participant of a Croquet space. By making this possible, we can move toward enabling peer-to-peer video conferencing within Croquet spaces - without the need for a server! So far, we have been successful in integrating two-way video (showing both your own live video and that of a peer as textures on two avatars in a Croquet space). Right now the performance could be improved a bit. We're getting refresh rates of about 3-4 refreshes per second for the textures applied to an avatar (while the frame rate of the space is largely unaffected). The refresh rates are much higher when video textures are applied to static objects. At this time, we're not quite sure where the bottleneck of the refresh rate might be. We could probably improve performance via a more complex sort of video than sequence of individual images (although a 1,000 Mbit network could theoretically carry about 1,300 aggregate frames/second at the largeish 160x120, 32 bit depth we are using). Assuming that the clients are arbitrarily fast, which they are not, there would be enough LAN bandwidth after various overhead for many to many broadcast of perhaps 100 10 frames/second videos at 96x96 pixels. That means that a conferencing approach might not need optimization in a LAN environment with fast switched connections to peers running fast and well-optimized Croquets. We're hoping that it will perform about as well as any other Croquet visual data set manipulation. Still, our preliminary work has been done in the pre-Jasmine build. Right now we are getting our stuff into Jasmine for some demos in early November. This means that method names and such may change and require some re-writing. I am also designing the TV set-like 3D objects in Max that will carry the video textures in a Croquet space.

Croquet and Signet

2004-10-15T09:13:00.000-04:00

The Croquet team at the University of Wisconsin has just been invited to join the Internet2 MACE Signet Early Adopter program (see http://middleware.internet2.edu/signet/ ). Signet is a tool for managing fine-grained authorization and role information. The Signet Working Group is led by Lynn McRae at Stanford University and seeks to explore a privilege management system from Internet2 MACE Signet. Their approach seems well suited to a P2P world, and there is software available in a month or two.

This invitation will bring Croquet and Signet development teams into a collaboration centered around privilege management in a VO (that's "Virtual Organization" in the sense of the term popularized by the Grid community) featuring a peer-to-peer interactive environment. Signet appears well suited to managing fine grained permissions on objects in a distributed environment. Involvement between Signet and Croquet Project efforts would highlight new areas of work for Signet because of its decentralized, peer-to-peer model and its unique provisioning challenge--how privilege information infrastructure can be extended to help manage users' access to objects and their services in Croquet space.

The first thing would be to explore mapping Signet privilege delegation trees and lattices to a Croquet-based peer-to-peer community. Imagine a collaborative educational effort that brought the subspaces of several participating developers at multiple institutions into a single Croquet world. I guess you can call this a virtual organization (VO). Signet would have to treat each developer in the VO as a root authority for permissions on objects they create, leading to an array of relatively small and short privilege trees when compared to a privilege management systems that covered financial, organizational and academic hierarchies across a single large research university. In addition, there is a limit to scale when permissions have to be granted to individuals one by one. As the VO grows, the authors of services and resources will eventually find it necessary to develop a shared VO-wide vocabulary of roles and rules in order to keep privilege granting manageable. The Signet team recognizes this as an area for future work. The Croquet project will now provide one driver for that effort.

Surviving the Slashdotting

2004-10-13T00:58:00.000-04:00

Earlier in the year, David A. Smith and Andreas Raab put a download package containing an earlier version of the Croquet software (known as "Solar" Croquet) on a previous version of the Croquet Project website published on the Squeakland server. It quickly became necessary to shut the server down for two reasons: The first was that they were "slashdotted", that is, the web site http://slashdot.org mentioned us and our former low-capacity server. The site was immediately overrun. Since that earlier site was intended to be lightly used, the immediate widespread interest that we received became somewhat of a problem. The other reason is that the version that had been posted there was only intended for small scale distribution in order to get some comments from a few people. It was never intended that the earlier site and its download package would serve as a launch pad for the project.

In July of this year, I committed to a complete redesign and implementation the Croquet Project website and have been hosting it here at the University of Wisconsin since then. For most of that time it's been in the back of my mind that once the Jasmine developers' release was made available for download, a subsequent slash-dotting might bring our server to its knees. The obvious solution was to set up BitTorrent as an alternate download option for each file on the site. This would decentralize the traffic and make it possible for us to scale up to any level of demand for the files. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this great new technology, BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer protocol, that allows users to connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of a file. Imagine that, using BitTorrent to distribute a legitimate file...what next?

On the evening of October 11th (which was the promised date for the "Jasmine" developers' release), Mark McCahill and I were furiously building, testing, packing, and uploading the platform-specific images to the Wisconsin servers. With the assistance of Dave Schroeder here at Wisconsin, we were able to publish the .torrent files on the site and "seed" two fast Internet2-connected machines with copies of the download packages. All of this before the stroke of midnight. Later the next day, and in the midst of a slashdot effect of about one million hits on the server over the twenty-four hours following a Slashdot posting on the morning of the 12th, David P. Reed was able to perform a 'blindingly fast" download of a 60 megabyte download package to his box at MIT using BitTorrent. No problemo...

What is Croquet?

2004-10-11T14:37:00.000-04:00

Croquet (http://croquetproject.org) is an environment for multi-user peer-to-peer collaboration and communication realized through compelling 3D visualization and simulations.

Here at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, we seek to develop an open architecture for delivering an advanced toolset for simulation and online community-based teaching and learning opportunities. We are collaborating with researchers at the University of Minnesota and many other educational and corporate institutions to design, produce, and disseminate an open source implementation of the Croquet infrastructure, a reference implementation of a highly modular client application, and standards-based API specifications to define cross-institutional sharing of user and object data and to support secure communication. This architecture is being developed to integrate with existing CMS technologies by offering a scalable, persistent, and extensible interface to network-delivered educational resources and tools for knowledge management and social presence. Through Croquet, educators and instructional designers will be able to use the client reference implementation’s authentication and interaction APIs to create feature-rich, client applications. Educational researchers will benefit from the assessment capabilities afforded by the Croquet architecture’s broad extensibility.

Who is Julian Lombardi?

2004-10-11T09:08:00.000-04:00

I'm one of six principal architects of the Croquet Project who, along with my colleagues Alan Kay, David A. Smith, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, and Mark P. McCahill, am involved in overseeing the project's implementation. I'm a former biology professor, author, and award-winning software designer with an interest in developing software systems and GUIs that support the gathering, representation, processing, and dissemination of information that is distributed across many individuals. I bring my background in developmental and evolutionary biology and in the study of emergent properties in biological systems to the work I do in information technology. I have also long been fascinated by the transformative potential of new interface technologies. In the late 1980s, and while a professor at The University of North Carolina, I began developing instructional software for biological and medical education. In 1995, I combined my interests in information technology and biology to design and create social computing systems. Based on this work, I was awarded a patent on technologies and processes for visualizing and organizing location-based information and in 1999, I founded ViOS, Inc., a company that developed 3D software for knowledge management and social interaction. There, I served as ViOS's Chief Creative Officer and Chief Software Architect. Over an 18 month period, I oversaw the successful completion of the company's core technology and the company successfully launched its product with an industry award-winning interface. In 2000, I was the subject of a feature article in Success Magazine, was identified as one of the nation's "Thought Leaders" in information technology by Access Magazine Online and the ViOS product won Best of Show at the Upside Magazine's prestigious Launch! event. I provide IT consulting services for companies and institutions in the public and private sectors and also manage a software R&D group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I help define and lead university-wide initiatives that seek to transform teaching and learning through the use of technology. Croquet is one such initiative...

Hello world!

2004-10-11T06:45:00.000-04:00

Everybody else seems to be blogging - so lets give this a try and see if it has any value...