Active Projects
From Croquet Consortium
A non-comprehensive listing of what various people are doing with Croquet.
A Directory of Public Croquet Spaces
Mark P. McCahill and his team at the University of Minnesota are adding support to Croquet for both an in-world and a web server listing active croquet spaces and the postcard needed to connect to each space. This makes it easier to locate other Croquet spaces you might want to visit, and see what is going on inside the space before joining it (the thumbnails are pushed out from live Croquet spaces!). The Minnesota team also plans to add a x-mime typehandler to current web browsers to launch Croquet when an XML-encoded representation of a "join me" postcard is clicked on in a web page. A web page with the directory is at http://earth.software.umn.edu/cgi-bin/KnownWorlds . A green background on the first column entry indicates that the world has recently been in contact with the server. A yellow background indicates that it has been a while since the last contact. Red means that the server has not heard from the Croquet space in a while (and its probably down).
If you are already running Croquet, you can also look through the active spaces and create a portal to another space by clicking on the thumbnail image for the space. The in-world thumnail images are updated every couple minutes form the point of view of the avatar that published the space to the active space registry.
Avatar Import from Blender
Blender is an open source cross platform tool for modeling and animation and has support for exporting .obj meshes and BVH animations (see http://www.blender.org/ ). Croquet supports importing motion capture data for avatars meshes as BVH files, but to date the only documented mechanism to modify/scale the BVH motion capture data to a given avatar's mesh and skeleton has been to use Poser. Documenting the workflow for creation and importing of avatars from Blender is underway at the University of Minnesota. This is part of a general project to get better avatars for our worlds.
Non-Player Characters (NPCs)
Besides working on better looking avatars, Mark McCahill's group (at the University of Minnesota) has been exploring easy ways to get robots such as recordable avatars, zombies, and other NPCs (Non-Player Characters) into Croquet. There is a movie of this here:
http://hedgehog.software.umn.edu/croquet/croquetMovies/RobotsInCroquet.mov
ChemStereoScalableCroquet
Click here to download ChemStereoMultiscaleCroquet.tar.gz
CITRIS Gallery Builder
The CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder creates digital galleries, which are simple virtual structures emulating real-life exhibitions and collections. Visitors find themselves in a virtual space composed of various rooms, with 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional artifacts and multimedia presented in the space. Each visitor is represented by an avatar which they can navigate through the 3D space.
The CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder, built on top of HP Labs' Croquet software, allows for group collaboration and interaction within the virtual space. That is, several people may have avatars present in the space at one time which can interact with each other, and with the gallery itself. Examples of interaction include discussion, annotation of artifacts, adding hyperlinks to artifacts, as well as introducing new items into the gallery and modifying the layout of the gallery and contents.
The system can be used in a traditional authoring mode, where one or more researchers curate the gallery, creating a space for exploration by later visitors. It can also be used as a purely collaborative 3D wiki, where everyone who visits is free to modify the space. In the second approach, curating itself becomes the learning experience.
The CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder has been developed in cooperation with HASTAC (Humanities, Art, Science and Technology: Advanced Collaboration), the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Stanford Humanities Lab, and the Stanford Library's Buckminster Fuller Archive. It uses digital content from the Fuller Archive in addition to artifacts digitized at the UCB Tele-Immersion Lab.
http://citrissrv1.eecs.berkeley.edu/hosted/projects/ith/gallery/
Qwaq Projects
Qwaq is a corporation dedicated to enabling Croquet-based applications in a range of settings.
With enterprise customers and partners, Qwaq has built and deployed proprietary Croquet-based collaborative spaces enabling our customers to integrate their existing 2D media, 3D models and simulations. These spaces enable interlinked virtual conference rooms dedicated to each area of corporated interest. Vertical markets represented by current customers include:
- Oil and gas
- Logistics
- Pharmaceuticals
For customers creating consumer-facing Internet services, Qwaq also provides a Croquet-based Services Platform. In addition to the platform features provided the Enterprise, the Qwaq Service Platform handles issues related to registration, billing support, advertising support and user management.
For contact information please see Qwaq
Information Space
InformationSpace is a causal set exploration tool developed by Brian Tabone. A causal set is basically a set of simple rules that define the relationship between bits in a space time. A common example of this is John Conway's game of life. I use the term InformationSpace to encompass space, time, causal rules, and initial conditions together as one. An information space is the structure of bits in a static space time, as defined by the causal set rules and initial conditions.
In this screenshot we see a 3D space time visualization of a classic r_pentomino using John Conway's Game of Life causal rules. Y is up towards the sky and is the time dimension. This visualization is done using Open Croquet
This causal set is defined as:
Causal Rules: Game of Life Initial Conditions: R Pentomino Space time: Three dimensional (2 dimensions of space, one of time).
InformationSpace allows you to set some initial conditions, attach a set of causal rules, and render a space time into a log file, which you can then view with the visualizer. Currently only 2 space dimensions are supported, 3D space will be supported in a future release.
http://www.softcentral.com/informationspace/
Immersive Language Instruction Tool
Here is a movie of a prototype that Mark McCahill's group made with along with some University of Minnesota folks interested in technology assisted language acquisition - Mahmoud Sadri, Penny Thompson, and Sara Mack.
http://hedgehog.software.umn.edu/croquet/croquetMovies/betterLangDemo.mov
The movie shows how Croquet might be for immersive foreign language learning. The idea is that a couple players are dropped into a space and sent on a quest. In this prototype the quest is to get across the lake and then to take the bus into the clouds. To cross the lake they will have work out how to find the boat, then pay the boatman (who is hungry), then demonstrate that they understand when the bus departs. In other words, the narrative structure is like the rhetoric of many games: start without assets, gather assets and pass some sort of test to move to the next level.
DualMazeAgain
Many moons ago, Dave Faught wrote a game called DualMaze for the Amiga. It made use of the specialized graphics hardware in the Amiga that allowed two overlapped graphics fields to be scrolled independently, with a separate randomly generated maze in each field. It was kind of fun to play. Now he is working on a remake of DualMaze in Croquet, but the concept has changed a bit. This time, DualMaze is a space inside Croquet that contains two mazes, one above the other. As you enter the space, you are inside the upper maze but gravity pulls you down to the maze below.
The idea is that you solve the maze that you have fallen into below to find a "magic" button that causes the mazes to rotate around in space so that the lower one becomes the upper one and the upper one becomes the lower one. Gravity once again takes hold and you fall down into the lower maze, where you can find your way back to the portal where you entered the space. This is a work in progress and a learning experience to see how much of this can really be done in Croquet.
See http://map.squeak.org/packagebyname/DualMaze
Worldbase Digital Repository
The University of Minnesota ran a prototype digital repository for the Jasmine codebase where objects, annotations, and meta data could be stored, searched, and instanced from. As we begin connecting Croquet spaces, it makes a lot of sense to get the digital object commons going again, so this is a project for this fall. The initial work will be centered on supporting free-to-use/redistribute content.
Annotation Tools
We had a number of annotation tools developed in Jasmine, that are being ported to the hedgehog codebase. A first iteration on thumbtack annotations now works, but we also want to allow non-texture annotations, and 3D concept mapping, which were both part of Jasmine. THis is a relatively low priority at the moment at the University of Minnesota, so if someone else wants to dive in, go for!
Video Avatars
Video avatars paint live 2D images (typically taken by a web cam) onto an avatar so that you can see a lifelike representation of the person running the avatar.
Brie
Brie is a language architecture and framework that supports direct manipulation and creation of 3D content and user interfaces. The component-based architecture of both the language and the UI framework is described in a paper written by its designers, Howard Stearns, Joshua Gargus, and Julian Lombardi. Brie’s language is an extension of Squeak Smalltalk that facilitates the creation of interoperable components within shared Croquet-based 3D spaces. Such components can be made to interact with (and be composed of) independently created components. Interaction between components will be possible even if each component is designed and implemented without knowledge of the others. The Brie framework also delivers a proof-of concept UI for a future Croquet-based level-editing application. Brie is presently being developed at Duke University and the University of Wisconsin.
Framework
Brie
Brie-Kernel
BrieObject
activeCamera
BrieBehavior
BrieManager
BrieManagerDefaultedState
BrieState
BrieDefaultedState
Brie-CroquetIntegration
TBrieSwitch
Brie-UserInterface
BrieSlider
BrieHalo
Categories and Classes
Brie
Brie-Components
BrieTeapotMorph
TBehavior
TBehaviorAbstractMenu
TBehaviorAcceptInfoItemValue
TBehaviorAccessor
TBehaviorActivate
TBehaviorActivateOrSelectAndStartDrag
TBehaviorAddBehavior
TBehaviorAddBehaviorToMenuComponent
...
...
...
etc.
Brie-Documentation
BrieDocumentation
Brie-Filters
Filter
FilterGroup
TBrieSwitch
TComponentInteractor
TFilterPortal
TFilterablePortal
TSwitch
Brie-Frames
TBrieBillboard
TBrieConnectorLine
TBrieTapeMeasure
TCircle
TFlatText
TLine
Brie-Logging
Activation
ActivationLogger
BehaviorActivation
BrieTraceData
GestureActivation
StackActivation
TraceInfo
Brie-NonRelease-OpenGL
OpenGL
Brie
clearFilterGroups
filterGroups
GL_ARB_texture_compression
...
...
...
etc.
Brie-Support
TBrieGesture
Brie-Widgets
TComponentSlider
A Croquet Game Called Q
Here is a little demo somewhat inspired by Quidditch.
Strick has a wiki page with the download, instructions, and screenshots here:
That page also has lots of hints for beginners to be able to download Croquet, the Q game, and to run them.
Rubik's Cube in Croquet
Here are a couple of videos of a Rubik's Cube in Croquet space on YouTube. This is work done by one of Robert Hirschfeld's students at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam (see http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/personen/professoren/hirschfeld.html). Looks like they used the embedded the cube inside the standard 3D edit box so that you can use the edit box to rotate the cube around. Pretty cool!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnT6tXA5MDs
Croquet-Related Doctoral Thesis
Many non-professional computer users are intrigued by three dimensional graphics. They have seen rendered digital creations in movies like Toy Story or have played 3D computer games. Furthermore, with the advancement of graphics hardware in consumer PCs 3D content is becoming more and more common. Nonetheless, easy ways for the user to create his own unique 3D graphics are still missing.
This thesis by Michael Kleiber shows how non-professional users can create 3D graphics in an easy but still flexible way to allow even arbitrary creations. It develops requirements for a pen controlled authoring suite in three dimensions. Especially the unique features of pen input are investigated in detail and new interaction schemes making use of these features are developed. A new concept for 3D creations is presented which is based on placing free form user created objects in 3D space to build larger more complicated structures.
The developed demonstration application lets the user shape the landscape of the virtual world, create unique objects and place vegetation freely. All these tasks are supported by new pen based input techniques. Also, the developed application can be used in future research projects which focus on interacting with 3D worlds using non-standard input devices.
Finally, a short informal user study was carried out to evaluate the developed authoring suite and the new pen based interaction schemes. The results of his thesis indicate that the new navigational techniques are especially intuitive and the concept of creation is easily understood. Yet, it also indicates that much more work needs to be done in the area of human computer interaction when targeting non-professional users.
see http://games.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/?id=441
Croquet-Based WiscWorlds
Access to Croquet-based test worlds out of the University of Wisconsin can be had at http://opencroquet.org/WiscWorlds/
A Commercial Game
A member of the Los Angeles Smalltalk User Group, is presently working on a commercial game built with Croquet.
Early Participants in Croquet Activities
We wish to extend special thanks to our early partners in this effort. These included institutions and organizations whose members actively supported the development and implementation of Croquet technologies, shared research and development based information focused on the use of Croquet technologies, and collaborated on projects with the Croquet architects.
- 3DLearn LLC - Janet Hale
- 3DSolve Inc. - Frank Boosman
- Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab - Judy Brown
- Akademia Systems Corporatation - Gen Suzuki
- Applied Minds Inc. - Danny Hillis
- Boston University - Ed Boyce
- Clotho Advanced Media Inc. - Preston Austin
- Columbia College - Wade Roberts
- Cornell University - Margaret Cornit
- Des Moines Area Community Colleges - Ann Watts
- Duke University - Julian Lombardi
- Hewlett Packard Inc. - David P. Reed
- Impara - Michael Rueger
- Informed Balance - Jeff Horvath
- James Madison University College of Education - Richard Ingram
- Kyoto University - Katsumi Tanaka
- National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) - Edee Wiziecki
- National Inst. of Information and Communications Technology (Japan) - Yutaka Kidawara
- MIT Media Lab - John Maloney
- Qwaq Inc. - Greg Nuyens
- San Diego State University - Jeff Sale
- The Univ. of California Berkeley CITRIS - Rick McGeer
- The Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Dept. of Computer Sciences - Ralph Johnson
- The Univ. of Magdeburg Computer Games Lab - Maic Masuch
- The Univ. of Minnesota-Twin Cities - Mark McCahill
- The Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison - Howard Stearns
- United States Military Academy at West Point - Frank Wattenberg
- University of Maryland University College - Sal Monaco
- Viewpoints Research Institute Inc. - Kim Rose
