Open standards Croquet

As an open source platform, Croquet is completely non-proprietary and can be modified to suit any organization's needs. This will make it especially suitable for the widest possible array of uses, in that adopting groups will have the ability to adapt Croquet for usage and public as well as non-public applications without being bound to any particular private sector vendor. Croquet goes beyond existing device-independent software platforms by enabling bit-identical software execution across all supported operating systems, and is available on the Windows, Mac OS, and Linux platforms.

David A. Smith, chief technical officer of 3Dsolve, serves as the lead architect for Croquet. Smith's participation in this effort gives 3Dsolve access to Croquet at the deepest possible level, along with unparalleled knowledge of the fundamental workings of the platform.

Croquet's collaboration architecture is being designed by Dr. David P. Reed, adjunct professor at the MIT Media Lab and a principal developer of TCP/IP, the communications technology that underlies the Internet. The overall Croquet effort is led by Dr. Alan C. Kay, senior fellow at HP Labs and president of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc. Known for his seminal contributions to computer science while at Xerox PARC, Dr. Kay has received virtually every major award in computer science, including the 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize and the 2003 Turing Award. The development of Croquet is supported by the Hewlett-Packard Company, Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., and the Croquet Educational Consortium, a joint effort of the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota.

Croquet as a Visualization Environment
Croquet is a new open source software platform designed from the ground up for the development and deployment of applications enabling extremely rich visual collaboration between users. Croquet combines state-of-the-art 3D visualization with an extraordinarily innovative architecture for rich collaboration.

Croquet is focused on the simulation and communication of complex ideas. We call this communication enhancement -- the direct extension of the abilities of humans to develop, understand, and describe even the most complex simulations. Croquet enables this communication by acting as the equivalent of a broadband conferencing system built on top of a 3D user interface and a peer-to-peer network architecture.

Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between teams of users. Croquet is a totally ad hoc multi-user network. It mirrors the current incarnation of the World Wide Web in many ways, in that any user has the ability to create and modify a home world and create links to any other such world. But in addition, any user, or group of users (assuming appropriate sharing privileges), can visit and work inside any other world on the Internet. Just as the Web has links between Web pages, Croquet allows fully dynamic connections between worlds via spatial portals. The important differences from the Web are that Croquet is a fully dynamic environment, everything is a collaborative object, and Croquet is fully modifiable at all times.

Croquet offers deep collaboration -- the ability of members of a group to work together in real-time on complex projects that require a range of different media to express, while sharing a common overall goal. The members of the group may all be engaged on a single aspect of the project, or may be working on different parts, aware of their relationship to the whole. This focus can change dynamically.