 Real time, interactive, 3D map of this very same world. Change something in the world, the map changes. Move something in the map (as one would a chess piece), the object in the world represented by it moves the same way. The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, an open source software platform for developing and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Croquet provides a flexible framework in which most user interface concepts can be prototyped and deployed to create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations. Croquet can be used to construct highly scalable collaborative data vizualizations, virtual learning and problem solving environments, 3D wikis, online gaming environments (MMORPGs), and privately maintained/interconnected multiuser virtual environments. Image File history File links Interactive_3D_map_of_same_world. ...
Image File history File links Interactive_3D_map_of_same_world. ...
link titleThe word international can mean: Between nations or encompassing several nations. ...
Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
In computing, a platform describes some sort of framework, either in hardware or software, which allows software to run. ...
A simulation is an imitation of some real device or state of affairs. ...
Technical functionality
Applications written using Croquet are automatically collaborative between people and the result of their work process within a Croquet environment is immediately available to other users. Neither the users nor the programmer needs to do anything special to make this happen since application objects in Croquet share a common protocol that allows them to cooperate with each other. When a programmer uses the Croquet libraries to render an object individually, the system will also take care of rendering it in relationship to all the other objects. The system will also take care of combining the sound of all the objects with respect to their relative positions to the user. This is true for even those application objects that are only display wrappers for something in another system external to Croquet. In this way, separately developed multimedia and other rich content may be combined by cooperating users of the system into cooperating objects.
Media content authors, programmers, and those moving through and interacting with the Croquet world simultaneously participate and collaborate in a dynamic, concurrent environment where they work, explore, and learn at a level of integration not easily achieved by other technologies or environments. Those running the Croquet software simultaneously create and participate in continuously modifiable, peer-to-peer networked (self-published, self-hosted), 2D and 3D environments. They also create and edit the visual objects contained in them. The Croquet software provides a seamless, dynamic architecture, framework, and interface for delivering data and visual/auditory content that is persistent (over time and distance), fully extensible, timely, and reliable -- and yet scales to a large number of participants without central servers. The code for every memory 'object' is editable, and hence reprogrammable, even while instances of that object remain in memory and routines are running in memory that reference that object. A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively few servers. ...
Self-publishing is the publishing of books or other media by those who have written them. ...
Underlying Croquet is an object-oriented semantics based on active objects that have the capability of temporal reflection. That is, each object is aware and in direct control of its behavior in time. Croquet also directly supports replication of computation, allowing computation to be moved close to the point of interaction on demand, while maintaining a consistent view of behaviors that can scale to include thousands of nodes. Consequently, Croquet is defined so that replication of computations is just as easy as replication of data.
Croquet is designed to provide a framework for developing 2D and 3D applications to ease and simplify co-creativity, knowledge sharing, and deep social presence among large numbers of people, simultaneously. Within the 3D, virtual reality, wide-area environments that are made possible by Croquet, participants enjoy synchronous telepresence, shared access to Internet and other network-deliverable information and media resources, and the ability to design complex spaces individually or while working with others. Every visualization and simulation within Croquet is a collaborative object since Croquet is fully modifiable at all times. It has been proposed that Telerobotics be merged and redirected into this article. ...
Wooden mechanical horse simulator during WWI. A simulation is an imitation of some real thing, state of affairs, or process. ...
Collaboration, literally, consists of working together with one or more others. ...
The Croquet Consortium The Croquet Consortium is an international alliance of industry and academic institutions that seeks to advance and promote the development, application and widespread adoption of open source Croquet technologies in research, industry, and education and to coordinate large-scale institutional participation in Croquet-related initiatives. The consortium is being organized by several corporations and universities including: link titleThe word international can mean: Between nations or encompassing several nations. ...
Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
A corporation (usually known in the United Kingdom and Ireland as a company) is a legal entity (distinct from a natural person) that often has similar rights in law to those of a Civil law systems may refer to corporations as moral persons; they may also go by the name...
A university is an institution of higher education and of research, which grants academic degrees. ...
Duke University is a private coeducational research university located in Durham, North Carolina, US. The school, which officially became Duke University in 1924, traces its institutional roots to 1838. ...
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public university located in Madison, Wisconsin. ...
Washington Avenue Bridge at night The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, almost always abbreviated U of M, and sometimes referred to as The U by locals, is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
For the unrelated Jesuit university in Chestnut Hill, see Boston College. ...
The University of California, Los Angeles, popularly known as UCLA, is a public, coeducational university situated in the neighborhood of Westwood within the city of Los Angeles. ...
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university with its main campus located at Point Grey, in the University Endowment Lands adjacent to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and another smaller campus known as UBC Okanagan located in Kelowna, British Columbia. ...
USMA is an acronym for the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. ...
The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ...
Apple Computer, Inc. ...
The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, UCB, or simply Berkeley) is a prestigious, public, coeducational university situated in the foothills of Berkeley, California to the east of San Francisco Bay, overlooking the Golden Gate and its bridge. ...
Stanford redirects here. ...
Supporting Technology
 Adding 3D Notes linked to 3D Objects & Places
 Croquet allows the user to edit the source code of the 3D world from within the world, and immediately see the result while the world is still running. The running program does not have to be ended, and there is no compile-link-run-debug development loop. Any part of the program may be edited, down to the VM & OpenGL calls. Image File history File links Adding_Notes_To_3D_objects_and_places. ...
Image File history File links Adding_Notes_To_3D_objects_and_places. ...
Image File history File links Edit_Source_Code. ...
Image File history File links Edit_Source_Code. ...
TeaTime TeaTime is a scalable real-time multi-user architecture that is the basis for Croquet's object-object communication and synchronization. It is designed to support multi-user applications that can be scaled to massive numbers of concurrently interacting users in a shared virtual space. The most directly visible part of this architecture is the TObject class which is used to define and construct subclassed Tea objects. A Tea object acts with the property that messages sent to it are redirected to replicated copies of itself on other users participating machines in the peer-to-peer network. All of the interesting objects inside of Croquet are constructed out of subclasses of TObject. This messaging protocol supports a coordinated distributed two-phase commit that is used to control the progression of computations at participating user sites. In this way, messages may be dynamically redirected to large numbers of users while maintaining the appropriate deadline based scheduling. Thus, TeaTime is designed to allow for a great deal of adaptability and resilience, and works on a heterogeneous set of resources. It is a framework of abstraction that works over a range of implementations that can be evolved and tuned over time, both within an application, and across applications.
Key Elements of the TeaTime Approach - A coordinated universal timebase embedded in communications protocol
- Replicated, versioned objects - unifying replicated computation and distribution of results
- Replication strategies - that separate the mechanisms of replication from the behavioral semantics of objects
- Deadline-based scheduling extended with failure and nesting
- A coordinated distributed two-phase commit that is used to control the progression of computations at multiple sites, to provide resilience, deterministic results, and adaptation to available resources.
- Uses distributed sets
Squeak A Squeak-based programming environment serves as Croquet's foundation since Croquet requires capabilities best provided by a true late-bound message-sending language while at the same time providing users with collaborative access to everything from the virtual machine to the compiler. Croquet's relationship to Squeak gives Croquet the property of a purely object-oriented system. This allows for significant flexibility in the design and the nature of the protocols and architectures that have been developed for Croquet. Another key feature of Squeak is its generalized storage allocator and garbage collector that is not only efficient in real-time (so that animations and dynamic media of many kinds can be played while the garbage collector is collecting), but that allows reshaping of objects to be done safely. Like Squeak, Croquet supports many non-English languages and fonts such as German, Spanish, French, and Japanese. The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80, by Smalltalks originators, so it is object-oriented, and reflective. ...
In general terms, a virtual machine in computer science is software that creates a virtualized environment between the computer platform and the end user in which the end user can operate software. ...
A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language, multi-target compiler. ...
The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80, by Smalltalks originators, so it is object-oriented, and reflective. ...
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a computer programming paradigm in which a software system is modeled as a set of objects that interact with each other. ...
The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80, by Smalltalks originators, so it is object-oriented, and reflective. ...
History
 Croquet Avatar with Wireframe Portal, eToy, & Mirror Croquet is the confluence of several independent lines of work that were being carried out by its six principal architects, Alan Kay, David A. Smith. David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Julian Lombardi, and Mark McCahill. The present identity of the project has its origins in a conversation between Smith and Kay in 1990, where both expressed their frustration with the state of operating systems at the time. Image File history File links Croquet_Screenshot. ...
Image File history File links Croquet_Screenshot. ...
Alan Kay during an interview. ...
David A. Smith at work in 2005. ...
David P. Reed is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking. ...
Julian Lombardi in 2006. ...
Mark P. McCahill (born February 7, 1956) has been involved in developing and popularizing a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s. ...
This article is about the year. ...
In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ...
In 1994 Smith built a working prototype of a two user collaborative system that was a predecessor of the core of what Croquet is today. Also in 1994 Mark McCahill's team at the University of Minnesota developed GopherVR, a 3D user interface to Internet Gopher to explore how spatial metaphors could be used to organize information and create social spaces. In 1996 Julian Lombardi approached Smith to explore the development of highly extensible collaborative interfaces to the WWW. Later, in 1999, Smith built a system called OpenSpace, which was an early-bound variant of Croquet. Also in 1999, Lombardi began working with Smith on prototype implementations of highly extensible collaborative online environments based on OpenSpace. One of these implementations was a prototype implementation of ViOS, a way of spatially organizing all Internet-deliverable resources (including web pages) into a massively-scaled multiuser 3D environment. 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated as the International Year of the Family and the International Year of the Sport and the Olympic Ideal by United Nations. ...
1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated as the International Year of the Family and the International Year of the Sport and the Olympic Ideal by United Nations. ...
In 1995[1], the Gopher developers at the University of Minnesota released GopherVR. GopherVR was an enhanced version of the Unix and Macintosh gopher clients that included a 3D visualization tool for viewing resource collections as 3D scenes. ...
Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol designed for the Internet. ...
1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year for the Eradication of Poverty. ...
Graphic representation of the world wide web around Wikipedia The World Wide Web (WWW, or simply Web) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). ...
1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Old Farts by the Sometimes-United Nations. ...
1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Old Farts by the Sometimes-United Nations. ...
Origin, the center of the ViOS world, where users first enter the online world. ...
Smith and Kay officially started the Croquet Project in late 2001 and were immediately joined by David Reed and Andreas Raab. Reed brought to the project his longstanding work on massively scalable peer-to-peer messaging architectures in a form deriving from his doctoral dissertation that was published in 1978. The first working Croquet code was developed in January 2002. Simultaneously and independently, Lombardi and McCahill began collaborating on defining and implementing highly scalable architectures for multi-user collaboration and were invited by Kay to join the core architectural group in 2003. From 2003-2006 the technology was developed under the leadership of its six principal architects with financial support from Hewlett-Packard, Viewpoints Research Institute Inc., The University of Wisconsin, The University of Minnesota, the Japanese National Institute of Communication Technology (NICT) and private individuals. On April 18, 2006 the project released a beta version of the Croquet SDK 1.0 in the open source. 2001: A Space Odyssey. ...
A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively few servers. ...
This article is about the thesis in dialectics and academia. ...
1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday. ...
For album titles with the same name, see 2002 (album). ...
2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is a very large, global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. ...
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public university located in Madison, Wisconsin. ...
Washington Avenue Bridge at night The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, almost always abbreviated U of M, and sometimes referred to as The U by locals, is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system. ...
2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
In software engineering, development stage terminology expresses how far through the development sequence things have progressed and how much further development a product may require. ...
A Software Development Kit, or SDK for short, is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, operating system or similar. ...
Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...
Principal architects The principal architects behind the Croquet Project are: - Alan Kay – Initial vision and primary motivator
- David A. Smith – Initiated the Croquet project. A systems designer who creates 3D graphical environments and games such as The Colony, the first 3D interactive game
- David P. Reed – Creator of the Internet design principle known as the "end-to-end argument" (with others) which describes the economics of group formation in networks which helped the design of the TCP/IP internet protocols
- Andreas Raab [1] [2] – Smalltalk developer who wrote the graphical media and 3D parts of Squeak for MS Windows
- Julian Lombardi – Creator of multi-user 3D online worlds (see ViOS)
- Mark P. McCahill – Creator of navigable, interlinked internet data stores such as Internet Gopher and the first graphical access to POPmail
Alan Kay during an interview. ...
David A. Smith at work in 2005. ...
The Colony was a computer game released in 1988 by Mindscape for the Apple Macintosh. ...
David P. Reed is an American computer scientist, educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known for a number of significant contributions to computer networking. ...
The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80, by Smalltalks originators, so it is object-oriented, and reflective. ...
Julian Lombardi in 2006. ...
Origin, the center of the ViOS world, where users first enter the online world. ...
Mark P. McCahill (born February 7, 1956) has been involved in developing and popularizing a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s. ...
Gopher is a distributed document search and retrieval network protocol designed for the Internet. ...
Philosophy: a learning environment
 Multi-user, multi-lingual text editing in 3D Alan Kay and Seymour Papert envisioned in the 1960’s the computer’s role as a tool for the mind… an “idea processor”. They have worked at bringing computers into this role for adults and children through several of Croquet’s predecessors like the Logo language and environment by Papert and Squeak, the open source Smalltalk language and environment, by Kay. In turn, for Croquet’s interface and architecture, Kay incorporated many educational principles discovered by Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori, and Jerome Bruner. Image File history File links Multi-user_text_editing_in_3D.jpg I made this image myself. ...
Image File history File links Multi-user_text_editing_in_3D.jpg I made this image myself. ...
Alan Kay during an interview. ...
Seymour Papert Seymour Papert (born March 1, 1928 Pretoria, South Africa) is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. ...
Logo turtle graphic The Logo programming language is a functional programming language. ...
The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80, by Smalltalks originators, so it is object-oriented, and reflective. ...
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. ...
Jean Piaget [] (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental psychologist, well known for his work studying children and his theory of cognitive development. ...
Maria Montessori Maria Montessori (August 31, 1870 – May 6, 1952) was an Italian educator, scientist, physician, philosopher, feminist, and humanitarian, and the first early childhood educator to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. ...
Jerome S. Bruner (b. ...
Kay and Papert expected computers (with the right software) to enhance learning and education through a media rich, enhanced communication medium and consequently benefit humanity in general as a result of the better communication of “powerful ideas”, ideas that “make the invisible somewhat visible”, ideas about truths that transform civilization’s thinking that are not common to all cultures but which must be discovered or invented by a culture and shared. Image File history File links Croquet_Spreadsheet. ...
Image File history File links Croquet_Spreadsheet. ...
Kay’s philosophy suggests that if we consider science as an ever-improving mental map of causality as observed in the real world just as we observe cartography (map making) steadily improving our map’s accurate representation of the real world, we can consider Croquet as an ever-improving map of symbols and of place to reflect our understands of science, the real world, and of each other.
To paraphrase Papert: In France, children grow up learning French fluently, just as we expect them to do. Yet, we have not allowed ourselves to imagine that children could all learn mathematics just as fluently as they learned their native language, if they grew up in a “Mathland”. Croquet, just as Squeak did earlier, tries to be that “Mathland” (and any other “land of an academic discipline” that its participants care to create for themselves and for each other). Euclid, Greek mathematician, 3rd century BC, known today as the father of geometry; shown here in a detail of The School of Athens by Raphael. ...
The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80, by Smalltalks originators, so it is object-oriented, and reflective. ...
Other educational principles incorporated by Kay and Papert include:
Kay and Papert consider Croquet and Squeak just one part of the two parts necessary to help humanity. They hope that Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 laptop effort, which they co-developed with him, will help distribute such learning, discovery, and communication software for youth around the world to use to supplement and improve the students’ own learning environments. In turn, they hope that these students’ discoveries and “powerful ideas” can be self-published by the same interconnected software to be made available to the rest of civilization. Learning-by-doing is the concept of economic theory. ...
A mathematical model is an abstract model that uses mathematical language to describe the behaviour of a system. ...
It has been suggested that Communal constructivism be merged into this article or section. ...
Project based learning is a pedagogic approach that intends to bring about deep learning by allowing learners to encounter problem solving opportunities in the context of a complex, open-ended project. ...
Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or self-directed learning. ...
Nicholas Negroponte Nicholas Negroponte (born 1943) is an architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Media Lab. ...
The $100 laptop is an education project for creating an inexpensive laptop computer intended to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education. ...
Similar projects Some of the environments that are enabled by Croquet somewhat resemble those of Sun's Project Looking Glass in that they permit the display of 2D windows as if they were 3D objects floating in a three-dimensional world. However, Croquet has been designed to go much further given that the programming of the 3D world is virtually without limits (due in part to Squeak's late-binding architecture and metaprogramming facilities). The user can attach a note to the reverse of a rotated window. ...
The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80, by Smalltalks originators, so it is object-oriented, and reflective. ...
Metaprogramming is the writing of programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data or that do part of the work that is otherwise done at runtime during compile time. ...
In this domain Croquet reaches farther than Microsoft Research's Task Gallery for it is not bound to any particular operating systems, and eventually could constitute an operating system of its own by building more upon its Squeak foundations. However, Croquet’s lack of device drivers is its largest drawback as an operating system. The Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ...
In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation, derived directly from Smalltalk-80, by Smalltalks originators, so it is object-oriented, and reflective. ...
Croquet is also more extensible than Second Life in that it is free to share, modify and view the source code (due to a liberal license), it is not hosted on a single organization’s server (and hence governed by that organization), and it provides a complete professional programmer’s language (Smalltalk), IDE, and class library in every distributed, running participant’s copy. (The programming development environment itself is also simultaneously shareable and extensible). This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
An integrated development environment (IDE), also known as integrated design environment and integrated debugging environment, is a type of computer software that assists computer programmers in developing software. ...
Illustration of an application which may use libvorbisfile. ...
Virtual Object System is another open source project that aims to do much the same as Croquet. The Virtual Object System (VOS) is a computer software technology for creating distributed object systems. ...
See also In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system, a network or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. ...
A transaction is an agreement, communication, or movement carried out between separate entities or objects. ...
Alan Kay during an interview. ...
Seymour Papert Seymour Papert (born March 1, 1928 Pretoria, South Africa) is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. ...
Jean Piaget [] (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental psychologist, well known for his work studying children and his theory of cognitive development. ...
Maria Montessori Maria Montessori (August 31, 1870 – May 6, 1952) was an Italian educator, scientist, physician, philosopher, feminist, and humanitarian, and the first early childhood educator to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
Jerome S. Bruner (b. ...
DotSoul is an immersive 3D Virtual Reality MMORPG open to those who observe its Code. ...
Virtual reality (VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, be it a real or imagined one. ...
The Metaverse, a phrase coined by Neal Stephensons science fiction novel Snow Crash (1992) constitutes Stephensons vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future. ...
References - First paper David Smith and Alan Kay did for C5, intended to be an introduction to Croquet.
- C5 Conference and related papers
- David P. Reed's papers
External links - Croquet Project Website for Introduction, FAQs, Screenshots, Whitepapers, User Guide, Related Projects, Architecture, Croquet Roadmap, Programmer Guide, Croquet License, Downloads, and Croquet Blogs/Links
- Julian Lombardi's Croquet Blog
- Video of a presentation by Julian Lombardi & Preston Austin that demonstrates many of Croquet’s capabilities, October 13th, 2005
- Video by David Smith & Alan Kay done for a talk at Stanford
- Video done for the O'Reilly etech by David Smith & Alan Kay (broken up into nice bite-size chunks, also includes Alan's full Squeak demo)
- ViOS in "How Stuff Works"
- Croquet from Planet Smalltalk
- Croquet-Teapot
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