acceleration in the metaverse
Cobalt: Croquet metaverse browser
I think this is very important. Cobalt is an emerging open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application being built using the open source Croquet SDK. This pre-alpha version of the Cobalt application is being made freely available to the emerging virtual worlds community under the Croquet license as a way of fostering a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of education and research. The idea behind releasing this technology is to tap into the creative potential of the broader community as a way of advancing something that all of us can use to create deeply collaborative, greatly featured, and widely interlinked virtual environments on a very large scale.
A few weeks ago I wrote: Open Croquet integrates some of the best software engineering concepts and techniques, and “deserves” success. It is currently limited by its lack of accessibility—there is no such a thing as an easy access general purpose OC browser for OC metaverses (though in this excellent audio interview Julian Lombardi, the chairman of the board of directors of the Croquet Consortium, says that there may soon be one). The closed proprietary service Qwaq Forums is a showcase example of the advanced applications that can be built on OC, and provides an excellent virtual meeting environment with groupware tools, web browsing, spatial VoIP, webcam feeds and collaborative editing of documents in popular office formats.
Well, now there IS an easy access general purpose OC browser for OC metaverses. Cobalt is in a very early stage (pre-alpha as they say above) and looks primitive, but so did Mosaic. I understand that Cobalt is a browser: a tool that can be used to access a world wide web of linked Open Croquet metaverses built by users. This (Mosaic in the early 90s) is what started the explosive growth of the Internet in the early 90s, and it could now start an explosive growth of the metaverse in the late 00s. And everyone can be involved in the development of the world wide metaverse built on open source technologies.
Posted by G.P. on 03/05/08
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