World-Wide Web technology is primarily static. The technology is designed around slow repeated cycles of request-a-page/get-a-page. Technologies like Flash, Curl, and Laszlo are aimed at improving this interaction while staying within the WWW framework. But the Web isn't about interaction, it's about information and, to a certain extent, transactions. While these drivers remain unchanged, two stories in my local paper this week have shown me that the expectations of pace have changed. [Read More!]

Getting virtual worlds away from a computer screen and into a physical classroom space doesn't have to be hard. These Greenbush Labs guys are using a commercial computer/whiteboard link to run open source software based on the KAT. How cool is that?

Check out their other projects and the related stuff on YouTube. What a great way to get the word out. (See also.)

In another sign of the significance of virtual reality, MIT hackers transformed the Harvard benefactor into a character from the popular video game.

I figure there is no technology on earth to which the Chief Technical Officer of Intel Corp doesn't have access. Today he chose to talk about Qwaq and Croquet during his closing keynote address to the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco's huge Moscone Center.

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Yesterday Lockheed announced that it had bought Croquet simulations learning company 3D Solve. (3D Solve's founding CTO is David Smith, who is Chief System Architect for the Croquet Consortium, and CTO of Qwaq. Consortium point-man Julian Lombardi is an advisor.) Being Lockheed, the news was carried by financial folks like CNN and Merrill Lynch, but I'm most excited by the release carried by Gamasutra and Serious Games Source, which is all about Croquet.

This comes on the heels this week of Cisco blogs about Qwaq.

I'm old enough to know that all of this should be taken with a grain of salt. But it certainly ain't bad news, and it gives a lot of credibility to the Croquet platform. I hope that Croquet folks around the world are able to make good use of this news in setting up their own projects.

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This week I had posted links to some cool new Croquet project movies, but I missed this somewhat cold one from 3D Solve.

Check out the movies of U.Minnesota's neato language lab. They're leveraging Croquet's open architecture to produce custom behavior, and the unique core model to make everything efficiently recordable. The third movie blows me away. (But watch 'em all.)

Greenbush Labs (edu software) has a couple of movies showing what you can do right out of the box. Some of the stuff they guy tries isn't working quite right, but it's still cool as snot. Must be the tunes.

No movies yet of the Krestianstvo installations being shown at the top Russian art museums. Nikolay has also combined Croquet and the Sophie/FutureOfTheBook projects – not quite as in this wonderful movie by Daniel Lanovaz, but heading that way, I suppose.
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I was petting a cat this week. She was smiling and arching her back and obviously enjoying being alive. Then she suddenly turned and started licking herself, after which she repositioned her neck back under my hand. I realized then that cats don't “decide” to clean themselves. How do they keep track of which spot needs cleaning? Now? A cat's skin must have some distributed chemical mechanism that causes particular areas to itch on some approximate schedule. [Read More!]

There are a couple of weaknesses is Apple's awesome new iPhone that have technological explanations accepted by the Conventional Wisdom. I'm not buying these stories, and I think there are bad-business factors driving the decisions for memory and third-party applications. [Read More!]

My heart broke the day Julian left the University of Wisconsin: 11/1/05. We were struggling to get anything out the door. An amazing technology entrepreneur (and Lisp guy!) named Greg Nuyens was trying to hold startup Qwaq together with both hands. I knew it was going to be a tough time for Croquet.

Fast forward.

I have left the University of Wisconsin Division of Information Technology to work at Qwaq, Inc. Sweet!
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In this article, Linux entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth says, “We've started to use [Croquet] for planning and building Ubuntu.”

Linux works well. One of the hard parts with delivering on “Linux” (generically) is that there are a lot of variations. Croquet works on some combinations of kernel, libraries and device drivers, but not on others. I don't have a Linux box myself, so I haven't spent any time on it. (The Croquet Collaborative runs on FreeBSD, and does so as a graphicsless server.) It's tough to be trying to accomplish something while wrestling with configuration issues.

But Plopp offers a consumer-market product on many flavors of Linux (as well as Windows/Mac), but it doesn't (yet?) make use of the full collaborative Croquet SDK. Once it runs, it runs. I guess the Ubunto folks have got real Croquet running with their developer and business configurations, and are now starting to explore its use for doing real work.