We have users! I believe these are the first sustained end-user explorations of Croquet worlds anywhere on the planet – and the users themselves did the development of those worlds! [Read More!]

(Before my mailbox fills with citations (which I do appreciate)...)

There's a short commentary in the March issue of Nature by Vernor Vinge. He ruminates on the potential of collaborative computing, free and open software, and virtual worlds, and cites Croquet as an example.

There's a nice video of Sims creator Will Wright explaining the new game he's developing, called Spore. (An edited-down version of the video, concentrating on the game play, is here. (Thanks for the lead, John!)

Very cool stuff, and I think a nice addition to the set of collateral material that gets at some of the aspects of either Croquet or Brie. A very nicely done thing to compare against
[Read More!]

I gave a demo of Brie at the OOPSLA Croquet workshop in October, and Julian gave one a couple weeks ago at C5. Alas, no video, but the Brie papers are here and here.

This terrific video of the Alternate Reality Kit was made at Xerox PARC in 1987. So, of course, it's not actually Brie, but it does give a lot of the feel of what we're going for. There are a few UI differences and the ARK is only 2D, but the main thing is that Brie is synchronously collaborative, and therefore eminently shareable.

Another related thing (without a cool video) was PARC's Thing Lab.
[Read More!]

Everyone's been waiting patiently for Hedgehog. There's no way to know when the next step of David Reed's Tea Time will be available. As David Smith and Andreas Raab began working on Simplified Tea Time for Hedgehog, there was no way to know when that process would produce results.

The Croquet group at the University of Wisconsin is not in the Computer Science department. We're not driven by the theoretical concepts of Croquet for its own sake. We are in the Academic Technology department of the Division of Information Technology, and our interest is in building educational applications in Croquet. Adding stuff to the Croquet core is fun, but what we really need is to build learning environments with faculty. Last summer, we had the opportunity to just that, and we took it, even though we knew that the existing Jasmine proof-of-concept version of Croquet would not meet our needs. What to do?
[Read More!]

The first real release of Croquet is nigh.... [Read More!]

When I wrote “Touchability,” it had already been a while since a buddy had shown me a haptic mouse he was working on. For example, you could feel an actual bump when the mouse enters and leaves an object (a real version of what developers sometimes call rollover). Force feedback was such an obviously good thing that I didn't even mention then the cool stuff that's now happening in this area.

As much as I think physical touchability is good, I want to be clear that I want to make Croquet applications be emotionally touchable, too. I want to capture what it is that makes things seem (be?) real. Even without physical force feedback, it should still be fun to fondle stuff because of active visual and aural responses and good 3D design.

To be sure, I'd love to add to the effect with more sensory stimulus. There are huge possibilities, and I hope folks will explore them. This stuff is cool. There's someone working on stereo display for Croquet. Others working on large screens in public spaces. I don't doubt that we'll see Croquet on small or cheap devices. There's plenty of room for innovation.

When I first heard about the $100 laptop project, I didn't get it. Sure, I saw the value in having one laptop per child worldwide – I'm not stupid or mean – but I didn't see why it wouldn't just happen on its own. Prices are falling all the time. To make this project happen, it didn't require a world-class engineering team, it required a team of world-class shoppers, I thought. My mother-in-law should run this project. I even argued with Alan Kay about it, to the point where folks had to come take him away before I was able to understand why so much effort needed to be poured into this right now.

I was wrong, and Alan was absolutely right. (Big surprise, no?) I have been convinced by these dismissive remarks by Intel Chairman Craig Barret.

More links: UN, tech and good discussion, historical background, interview.

It's been heads-down hard work around here ever since OOPSLA in October. Haven't even filed my expense report yet. (Coding is more fun.) So I'm pretty late in posting that… [Read More!]

If the dominant medium of a culture defines it, what does it mean for us when TV is changing? How will it change, and how will that change us? A couple of MIT academics are discussing the former at here. Good reading, but missing the point. [Read More!]