Marginalia on Steroids

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Duke Honored

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark McCahill at Duke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

The version 1.0 release of the Croquet SDK is imminent!

Working Hedgehog

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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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!

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

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

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

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?

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

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...