Worldbuilders – Imagination, Identity and Play

Edusim is a free opensource 3D virtual world specifically for your classroom interactive whiteboard. Edusim is a powerful way to engage your students by bringing a 3D virtual environment that allows direct haptic manipulation of the 3D virtual learning objects directly from the interactive whiteboard surface. Edusim is extendable allowing multiple classrooms to connect their interactive whiteboards for collaborative learning session. Read more

Raph Koster, President of Areae, and his company’s lead programmer Sean Riley talk about what went right and what went wrong on the MetaPlace project – Read article

This is an interesting new development in Croquet and will add huge potentials to the building capabilities in Croquet.

An excerpt -
Aik-Siong Koh and other Malaysian programmers are developing an in-world 3D modeling tool for Croquet. As a first step, they are porting freeCAD into Croquet. freeCAD is a basic 3D CAD with advanced motion simulation capabilities. freeCAD was developed as a tool for teaching and learning geometry, kinematics, dynamics, vibrations, mechanisms, linkages, cams, machine design and physics. It offers users the ability to create and manipulate assemblies of simple 3D solids that can be connected by joints, constraints, contacts, motors, actuators, springs, dampers, forces, torques or gravity. Read more

News article on www.croquetconsortium.org -
On January 12th, it was announced at The Boston Media-Grid Summit that the Immersive Education Initiative has selected Croquet as one of three official “next generation” immersive education platforms. The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia companies, and foundations that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. Read more

Qwaq is a corporation dedicated to enabling Croquet-based applications in a range of settings. With enterprise customers and partners, Qwaq has built and deployed proprietary Croquet-based collaborative spaces enabling our customers to integrate their existing 2D media, 3D models and simulations. More

Qwaq Forums
Qwaq Forums, the company’s first product, is a secure virtual workspace application that significantly increases the productivity of distributed teams by bringing critical resources together in virtual places, as if they were in an actual physical location. A highly interactive and persistent environment, Qwaq Forums enables users to work, collaborate with others, and identify and solve problems. More

Qwaq, a Croquet project
Qwaq Forums uses the Croquet open source software development environment, which enables the creation and deployment of large-scale, distributed multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses. The Croquet architecture, supported by the Croquet Consortium, provides synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and devices. Continue reading article ‘Qwaq Unveils Virtual Spaces Software For Secure Enterprise Collaboration – March 13th, 2007′for more features.

It is important to point out that Croquet is presently in the form of a software developer’s kit (SDK) and not yet an application that can easily be used by end-users. It is very much a development platform. It comes complete with a few examples that illustrate different features and capabilities of the system which the uninitiated often and mistakenly think are finished end-user applications. Right now, the Croquet effort has not yet produced a polished end-user application in the open source. Several of the institutional partners in this effort are now working toward developing such an end-user application for relase in the open source. Read More

Read FAQs

Of specific interest are the uses of Croquet in education.

Broad areas of usage -
1. Collaborative Simulation
2. Education

• Next generation online library services
• Social software platform for online communities
• A tool to teach computer programming
• Research material repository and collaborative workspace
• Platform for developing educational games with assessment capabilities

3. 3D Gaming
4. Design

Details can be found here.

1. Croquelandia (Watch Movie 1) – Croquelandia is the first synthetic immersive environment for learning Spanish pragmatics. The movie shows an example of a Croquet world – the environment, the avatars, the look and feel, interaction methods, movement etc. Features highlighted – collaboration interaction, scaffolded imbedded feedback, asynchronous message board, voiceover IP, synchronous message chat, authentic simulated interaction and quest completion tracking.

2. Edusim (Watch Movie 2 and 3) – Edusim is an educational simulation prototype created using Croquet. Movie 2 is an introduction to Croquet use with an interactive whiteboard and Movie 3 shows kids working with Croquet on an interactive whiteboard.

Detailed information on the projects listed below can be found here. It is a listing of what various people have been exploring using pre-release Croquet technologies.

3. Collaborative for Croquet
Since Croquet is presently in the form of a software developer’s kit (SDK) and not yet an application that can easily be used by end-users, it is not possible for just anyone to create a world. ‘Collaborative for Croquet’ is an croquet-based example application to allow people with a non programming/ developer background to experience a Croquet world.

4. Arts Metaverse Project
Within the Arts Metaverse, users can create 3-D environments that could include buildings or spaces developed alongside their related video and audio clips, websites, and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Also see this posting.

5. Croquet-Based Realtime Art Installation
6. A Preliminary Directory of Public Croquet Spaces
7. OV3D: A Military Scenario Visualization Tool
8. Holodeck/CAVE Croquet
9. Collaborative Music Generation

10. Ancient Spaces
Developed in Arts Instructional Support & Information Technology at the University of British Columbia, ‘Ancient Spaces’ is an ‘open-source’ project that aims to deliver immersive, three-dimensional historical environments to your computer via the Internet – allowing multiple users to interact with artifacts, structures, and historical characters within an immersive and compelling virtual space. More on the website. Also see featured and current projects and images and videos of projects that are work-in-progress.

11. Croquet on Mars
12. Avatar Import from Blender
13. Croquet with TVML
14. Non-Player Characters (NPCs)
15. CITRIS Gallery Builder

16. Qwaq Projects
Also see this posting.

17. Information Space
18. Immersive Language Instruction Tool
19. DualMazeAgain
20. Worldbase Digital Repository
21. Annotation Tools
22. Video Avatars
23. Brie
24. A Croquet Game Called Q

25. Rubik’s Cube in Croquet
Video of a Rubik’s cube built in Croquet.

26. Croquet-Related Doctoral Thesis
27. A Commercial Game
28. ChemStereo Croquet

Click here for screenshot examples derived from various proof-of-concept, demonstration, and production implementations of Croquet-enabled multi-user environments.

What is Haptic Education?
Adding the tactile sensation to virtual learning. Haptic, from the Greek αφη (Haphe), means “pertaining to the sense of touch” (Miriam-Webster’s Online dictionary), and haptic technology refers to technology that interfaces with the user via applied tactile and/or force feedback, i.e. vibrations and/or motions. Read More

‘Several examples of successful use of haptics have been demonstrated in the areas of the arts, design, entertainment, and medicine (Laycock & Day, 2003); however, the field of education has been as yet untapped. The main barriers for haptic usage historically have been computing power and the high price of haptic devices, which have limited/prevented the application of haptics in fields that are traditionally economically bounded such as education. However, in recent years the prices of haptic devices have come down to a degree where they are no longer cost prohibitive. Thus, it is now a financially viable option within the field of public education.’

Second Life and Croquet were explored in a haptic education research project. The project was to program a virtual frog that could be dissected incorporating force feedback using the Novint Falcon. Novint Falcon is haptic device costing $239.

From Wikipedia: “In June 2007, Novint Technologies, Inc. introduced the first affordable, high-fidelity 3D Touch (haptic) game controller. The Novint Falcon replaces a mouse or joystick and lets users feel realistic game interactions, objects, environments, and force feedback in enabled games.”

‘Our ultimate goal was to get the haptic device talking to the virtual world. That meant both navigation and haptic feedback. We could then build virtual objects with relative ease. Most modern virtual worlds offer easy object importation capabilities, and with resources like Google’s 3D Warehouse there was already a large selection to work with.’ Read detailed study