Croquet Project

Hello


I was not sure where to post this but I was wondering if any of you have ever heard of this project and if so what are your thoughts on it?
It appears the project has some awesome talent if you look over the Bio's of the people on the about page listed below.

http://www.croquetproject.org/About_Us/about.html


controler

 

I have to say WOW!!!!!!! I thought all you smarties would have something to say about this project. The crew includes some of the creators of the internet.

I do not think you actualy read the page

I would think even Kevin or Nancy from Boclean would have posted, since they are from the original age.

controler

 

Hello,
Have read it and found it puzzling.
If I understand correctly, Croquet is a sort of a big meeting place with visualization of sites and applications. Sort of like a WoW game server, where you can interact with objects / people etc..?
Mrk

 

Mrkvonic

Yes I think you are correct but I don't know all the details about it either.
It appears some of the best technology from different minds went into it to create a new technology.
My son asked me to look it over. I think you can use it to create a virtual campus let's say. Where students can virtualy go from room to room. Where they can go into class virtualy and listen to the teacher give the lecture in 3 D.
Even though some technology comes from gaming, I think this is geared more towards education.
Mrkvonic? did you look over the about the people that frontiered the project?
I though their resume's were impressive.


controler

 

I forgot to mention Croque uses Squeak. Info on Squeak found here.

http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/about.html

 

Only ONE intelligent person responded here tisk tisk

 

I had the same kind of problem. Can someone offer a plain English synopsis ? Perhaps with that as a basis, I'd then be willing to slog through and read more about it. It's Sunday night and I'm trying to do the last of my recharging for the coming week. Sorry I don't have alot of spunk left to meet the intellectual challenge tonight.

 

The word deep is certainly used far too frequently, or maybe I'm just being somewhat shallow.

In some respects it seems to be an interactive realtime collaborative content/configuration management system thats more peer based rather than client/server. Sort of like content management meeting netmeeting on steriods and come with with realtime collaboration and a diffuse topology (vs. pure client/server).

But I could be wrong....

Blue

 

Hmmm.... OK, well, on my first complete pass through of the intro. page, I am getting the impression this is like Lotus Notes or some other collaborative workspace except you can do a lot more than document management and revision control, you're collaborating on objects, i.e., data sets and applications. Also, the workspace can span across or "reside" on the WWW rather than, say, a few synchronized (read "replicated") servers.

Is that really all that innovative or am I just missing the boat altogether ?

 

Well, I think our ship is still here, there's a bunch still in dock...

Getting something like this to work well (i.e. seemlessly and rapidly at the local PC), with no regard to hardware platform, and perhaps accounting for some regionalization issues, might be quite nice.

Aside from circumstances in which large scale community type interaction is desired (online socialization, social rallying (e.g. politics, etc.), and some group learning/geographically diverse university situations), it's not quite clear to me where the need is today. I can envision a few pie-in-the-sky scenarios. What's very unclear from the descriptions provided is whether this is, in a paradigmic sense, akin to the leap from simple bulletin boards to the web that many of us went through. I don't see it now, but I didn't see a lot of it then either, until it was almost on top of me.

Blue

 

Maybe it would make more sense for communities like: http://www.osforge.com/ or http://sourceforge.net/
But (last metaphor, I promise !) there may quite a few sticky wickets to get through before it could be something better than the way some of these open source projects already are set up.

 

You noticed that as well..., hmmm.

Actually, I believe these folks have a much firmer handle on where they want to go. If you look at the Whitepaper section of the site, one of the abstracts states:

augment learning with collaborative work envioronments, and I think you're pretty much there as far as their current desired functionality. There's a lot of fuzzy terminology being tossed around, but that's not out of line as things get fleshed out. As has been noted, these folks have professional track records that many would aspire to. They may be on to something, maybe not, but we'll never know until someone gives it a go, which it appears they are.

Blue

 

Hello,
I can already see where this will lead ... interactive adult sites , the sort of next step internet.
Mrk

 

I think it looks promising also. There are some collages students working with it now. My son asked me to take a look at it thinking I may know something about
anything LOL. After downloading both Squeak and Croquet, so far I think I need an online collaborative learning experience to figure out the thing.
All i know for now is Squeak is another OS wich can be used with or without another OS. the croquet project comes with three (image) as they call it files.
You load one of these image files into Squeak to begin work. Me thinks I should have went with the 6 year old version and not the expert to start with

I think the main thing croquet is being used for besides

is for collage students to set up virtual collages. I don't think this will encourage them not getting out of bed in the mornings though, but they will be able to go to their online collage and study and learn
I shall post some screen shots later.

 

That's actually in line with something that caught my eye while my older son was looking at schools to apply to this past year. Take Carnegie Mellon University for example, they have a main campus in Pittsburgh with a satellite campus now in Qatar and a somewhat more virtual CMU-West in Silicon Valley. This is the kind of setting where something like Croquet makes a lot of sense.

Post the screen shots when you get a chance, I'd like to see what this looks like in the flesh so to speak Could be interesting once sufficient horsepower is behind you.

Blue

 

here ya go Blue

second screen is from the First Steps TAB

Third screen is from the Programing Tools TAB

 

Second:

 

Third:

 

Yeah, I guess I did miss the boat, after all.