Some key differences between Second Life and Croquet are highlighted by Max Borders in this article.
Some excerpts from the article -
‘Conceptually, Second Life is exactly where we want to be. It’s immersive, it’s distributed and it has just about everything we need to start building “metaverses” (Neal Stephenson’s prescient 1992 term for virtual realities that run in parallel with our own). The trouble comes, however, with the architecture—not just the software required to make Second Life an alternative to TV Land, but the whole technical edifice upon which our Internet lives are currently built.’
‘Second Life will never scale because its designers embraced the computing hardware and software status quo. The architecture we currently enjoy was designed in large part for two-dimensional computing. Adding another dimension requires tremendous processing and bandwidth resources–resources that will start to cause bottlenecks in the hierarchical structure of the Web itself.’
‘Croquet is thoroughly peer-to-peer in both its application and its architecture. So it is not vulnerable to the limitations of hierarchy – either conceptually, or technically. It is a platform for networking just about everything. Mac? PC? Linux? It doesn’t matter. Croquet is built on a “virtual machine”, which means it transcends the boundaries of both operating system and geography alike, like some encoded blueprint for the space-time continuum. It not only can it scale to the level of the imagination, it will eventually look cooler than any game dreamt up by 20 geeks at Sony – and we will all participate in its creation.
Another article called ‘7 ways Croquet is better than Second Life‘ compares the two technologies.
