WiscWorlds application

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WiscWorlds application

Howard Stearns
We have been working on a prototypical Croquet application that I'd  
like to share with you.

The application is built on top of the Croquet SDK, and features:

    - A series of interconnected, persistent collaborative worlds.  
These worlds currently include the demo worlds, two Wisconsin  
teaching environments, and some spares. These are accessible via the  
Internet (WAN).

    - Communications via non-persistent, spatialized text chat, voice  
and webcam (voice and webcam are already pretty good on sync and  
lag), plus persistent text pads.

    - Multimedia publishing by simply dragging it from your desktop  
to the space, where it can then be manipulated collaboratively.  
Currently pictures, meshes, mp3 sound and mpeg video.

    - Access to legacy applications via VNC tablets within the  
collaborative spaces.

    - Participants contribute new content by the above, or create new  
stuff with new sketch, new space, new cube, new terrain, cut-and-
paste to make assemblies, and copying content or material onto other  
objects.

    - A real installer (currently ~20MB, but could be smaller).

    - Connect through Web pages using plugin on Windows, or  
standalone with one-button connection to the collaboration. (Mac is  
currently only standalone.)

    - Menus and drive buttons. (My four year old can and does use it.)

Go to http://opencroquet.org/WiscWorlds   -  Your startup experience  
depends a LOT on your network, whether I'm breaking anything on my  
end, what machine died in the middle of the night, etc.  But it will  
take you at least a minute.

We have not yet incorporated Mark's avatars, OpenAL-on-MacIntel  
fixes, and all the other cool things he's been working on, but we  
should. Check out http://croquet-bento.blogspot.com/2006/06/better- 
avatars.html

There's also a slew of bugs, and no performance or robustness tuning,  
and so on.  You'll note that this message is to croquet dev, not  
croquet-users nor to my blog, etc.

Howard Stearns, Josh Gargus, Jack Keel, Kael Greco
DoIT Academic Technology, http://www.wisc.edu/academictech
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1301 University Avenue, Madison, WI  
53715
  +1-608-262-3724