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/academictechUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison, 1301 University Avenue, Madison, WI
53715
+1-608-262-3724
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