Croquet continues with Croquet V.
My last post here was almost exactly two years ago. I revisited this blog and it has a great deal of interesting early Croquet posts, so it only makes sense to continue this story because it is getting quite interesting now. Croquet is a new kind of operating system - it has some extremely magical properties that are quite unique. I will be writing more about what makes it so powerful and…
I created an up-resed version of the 2003 demo that Alan Kay and I did at the O'Reilly ETech conference. It really holds up nicely.
We have been working hard on the latest, greatest version of Croquet. Next week we will be rolling it out for our friends to play with. David A. Smith Twitter: @Croquet Skype: inventthefuture I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move.
Why AR Will Win And Why it Matters How it Will Win David A Smith December 28, 2018 Originally printed in Michael Swaine's PragPub. https://theprosegarden.com/ “man is much more than a tool builder … he is an inventor of universes.” Alan Kay - “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages” There is a race between the extraordinary and compelling Augmented Realities – and the necessary and powerful…
Croquet V embedded in my blog.
Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE Andreas Raab was my best friend. Andreas loved to challenge me to express and exceed my abilities. In so doing, he forced me to challenge him. We pushed each other up the tallest mountains where, together, we had the honor of viewing the world from a new point of view. He loved to program. He was the best programmer I have ever known – by a lot. This is…
Tony Nemelka has just been named CEO of Teleplace and I couldn't be more pleased. I have had a number of discussions with him and some of the exceptional people he is bring with him since he started working with the company, and I am really impressed with his vision for the direction for the business and the clear focus he has on customer value. I am very proud that the company has been able to…
About three months ago, I joined Lockheed Martin STS as their Chief Innovation Officer. I have been wanting to pursue a project that was quite different from the direction that Teleplace has been going, and after about a year of discussion, it was clear that the direction I wanted to go and what Lockheed Martin was looking for fit extremely well. It is too early to talk about what I will be doing,…
I just bought a new phone, and it wasn't an iPhone, but it is still very cool. I have been planning to buy an iPhone as my next communication device - all my friends have one. I am very glad that they no longer feel the urge to demonstrate how cool they are by showing me some stupid picture or new app on their iPhone - except for Frank, of course. So why didn't I buy an iPhone? Well, it is a bit…
I just posted the video I made of Virtus Walkthrough. I created this in 1990 with David Easter and Mark Uland. I am actually demonstrating Virtus 4 here. Scott Haynes was responsible for this version, and I think it is the best version of Walkthrough we ever did. It was also, unfortunately the last. The overall design and interaction is almost identical to the original 1990 version, though. This…
Searching through my digital archives, I found the following walkthough for "The Colony". Not terribly useful anymore, but it will give you an idea of the depth of the game. This walkthrough was written 20 years ago... "The Colony" Revealed Copyright © 1989 by David A. Smith GETTING STARTED Where am I? You are on the DAS cruiser on the bridge. You have just crash landed on the colony planet…
Brandon Boyer at Boing Boing Offworld was kind enough to post a link to the Colony videos I made. You can see it here: A Look Back At the Colony
ICE stands for Interactive Collaboration Environment. This is the real proto-Croquet architecture I built at Virtus. The ideas were strongly influenced by Apple's OpenDoc architecture and conversations with Alan Kay. There were two versions of this, one with some really neat recursive drag and drop capabilities. This system was collaborative from the start, including voice and video. The "avatars"…
I finally got around to posting the videos I made of The Colony. I had to borrow an old Macintosh from David Easter (who also did the ports to the PC and the Amiga) to make these, and I used a video camera to record them. This demonstrates the game, and I talk a bit about the technology behind it and why I designed the game play the way I did. Let me know what you think. I will also be posting…
We were in the Wall Street Journal - with a picture! Check it out here: Virtual World Gets Another Life It includes an image of the new "Business Avatars" which have not been release yet, but look wonderful.
I have been spending a large amount of time talking to people about interoperability in virtual worlds. One problem is defining what it means - and why it is important. From what I can tell, the main thing people are looking for is a way to easily traverse from one virtual world to another. It would be great to be able to jump through a portal from Second Life into Qwaq and back. We already…
Andreas Raab wrote: In its ongoing commitment to Open Source, Qwaq has decided to release the first multi-core capable Croquet VM under the MIT license. Hydra VM is a virtual machine capable of running multiple Croquet images side-by-side, therefore being able to effectively utilize multi-core CPUs. Hydra VM is still in an early phase of development, but given the (very successful) early results,…
Mark McCahill and I have been discussing the top priorities for Croquet moving forward. Here is the list of the top six things that we will be doing for 2008. The main theme is interoperability. This is interoperability at many levels. First, ensuring Qwaq Forums and Open Croquet worlds are interoperable. Looking beyond that is allowing Croquet worlds and avatars to interoperate with other…
I am sure everyone has their own opinion about scripting inside of Croquet. Here are mine: - The scripting we use should be a popular language. Javascript is the obvious choice. Lua gets high marks for coolness, but most people have never even heard of it. It would be great to include any language, but getting the first one to work is a big enough project. - It needs to work INSIDE of the Island.…
Qwaq and Intel just announced that we will be collaborating to bring Mirimar technologies that were developed at Intel to market. This is exciting for a number of reasons. Mirimar is a beautiful and seamless interface with the users desktop, which will make Qwaq Forums even more of a compelling experience. And of course we get the opportunity to work directly with Intel and in particular with John…
I have been spending a great deal of my time lately thinking about scripting issues. Most people are a bit wary of diving into Smalltalk to get things done. Of course, it is really a marvelous scripting language in many ways, but people tend to find it a bit difficult. I think the reason for this is the same reason Lisp is a bit difficult. Both Smalltalk and Lisp have extremely regular syntax…
A draft of the Croquet Road Map is now available here: Go here: Croquet Road Map . There are three critical items: Island Classes, Two Dimension Infrastructure, and Documentation. These are the essential elements of the next big Croquet release, which I will discuss a bit later. The first item probably needs some elaboration. Island Classes are classes that are part of the replicated Island's…
I participated in a panel at the Spring Internet2 members meeting and a video of it is available online. For those of you wanting to get a demo of Qwaq Forums - check it out. Beware, there is about 3-5 minutes of nothing happening at the beginning of the video. Don't give up. I am the first speaker, but it is well worth watching Sandra Kearney at IBM and Robert Gehorsam of Forterra Systems and the…
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