Croquet

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Croquet is a system permitting the creation of of interconnected 3D worlds. But it is much more than a simple 3D or gaming library. It's an attempt to create tomorrow computer, a really new operating system having collaboration in its very core. According Max Borders, “Imagine the alpha-version of the Matrix or the Metaverse. In this environment, we could build anything we wanted. You might be in Hong Kong and I might be in London, but we could both walk around in Xanadu—caves of ice and all. We could meet, date, collaborate, explore, shop, conduct science and/or do Japanese gardening. How close are we to such a world? The ingredients for it are cooking in an open source movement called Croquet. Within ten years, it will swallow the Internet. Why? Because Croquet is the answer to a fundamentally different question: If we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could we go? “

Contrary to many multi-users virtual world systems, Croquet is based on P2P technologies: there is no need for one big server centralizing the behavior of numerous clients, with all the problems associated with scaling, bandwidth, etc. According the programming guide : "Croquet’s treatment of distributed computation assumes a truly large scale distributed computing platform, consisting of heterogeneous computing devices distributed throughout a planet-scale communications network. Applications are expected to span machines and involve many users."

Croquet is built on Squeak, an open source version of smalltalk that is very easy to use. Because of that, Croquet, (like Squeak) works in exactly the same way on almost all systems and machines.

Alan Kay, who some decades ago invented the modern personal computer at Palo Alto’s Xerox PARC, has played a fundamental role in the birth of Squeak and Croquet.

Croquet

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