The Perils of Open Source

Croquet is Open Source. This has had both a positive impact on the project and in some ways a decidedly negative impact. The positive is the positives that most open source projects enjoy - lots of interest and creativity building around the system, visibility, strong academic relationships - it even helps allay concerns of larger enterprise customers knowing that there will not be a Microsoft-type lock-in with a single vender.

From the start Croquet was developed completely out in the open. Even the very first, barely useful versions of the system were readily available to download, deconstruct, and criticize. Nothing wrong with this - we invited it, and the project profited from it. The big problem we had to deal with is people were disappointed with how much of the system was or wasn't working. I have heard people say "Yeah, I tried Croquet a few years back, but it.... " (you can fill in the blank with a number of choices). I can understand why people would be irritated. Some critical problems in Croquet took much longer for us to solve than we ever thought they would, we had spent a minimal amount of time on UI, back-end infrastructure, performance, etc... Getting something like Croquet to work at all was a monumental task. We didn't exactly have a model to work from. We were inventing - not reverse engineering.

Of course, anyone that has ever developed a larger project has seen these kinds of issues. I certainly have dealt with them many times. The big difference was no one saw any of my project's warts except my colleagues and me. And we worked hard to remove, or at least hide them before we unveiled the final polished application. Croquet was different - people have been able to randomly sample the state of the project and critique it based upon that sample. Even today, the Croquet API is not quite a user-centric architecture. It is much more akin to the Linux kernel, looking for a front end to empower the user and a back-end to help users find each other and provide additional services. On the other hand, it is doing almost everything we said it would - and it really works well. We have even started a company Qwaq, Inc. based upon the same open source system that you can download today. We are getting great reviews for our first product Qwaq Forums, even though it is till in beta today.

What is my point? I have enjoyed this very open development process. I have learned a lot, and made a huge number of new friends and colleagues. Overall, it has been fun in spite of certain comments from people. I do think that next time - if there is one - I will probably hold off releasing a new system until it is a bit more mature and robust. In some ways that is sad - I think people that have stayed with the project from the beginning have learned a lot about how a complex system gets built and how it evolves. Most of this would be missed if you were to jump into a more complete end-user experience. On the other hand, it would probably increase the probability of success. In marketing, you only have one chance to make a first impression. Qwaq Forums is making a GREAT first impression. It would have been nice if Croquet had the same opportunity.

David A. Smith

3D Worlds and Interoperability

I attended a working lunch this week at Harvard to discuss 3D interoperability. It was an interesting discussion. I think the biggest problem was simply the definition of interoperability. For some people at the conference, it meant as little as reconstructing someone elses content in another 3D environment, or maybe being able to somehow copy 3D data sets from one place to another. Others viewed it as being able to reuse and dress-up your personal avatar for shopping or for role-playing.

We even discussed the possibility of hooking Croquet up to Second Life via Croquet portals. This should be relatively straightforward to do - it would require a compound application of some sort, but since Croquet is already designed to hand off rendering to the adjacent Island (Croquet Islands and Second Life Islands are different kinds of things) when rendering through a portal, handing it to the Second Life client would not be much different. Coming back the other way might require a bit more finesse, as we would have to add some portal support to SL, and would have to call into an image based system. We have been doing something similar recently, so it is quite possible.

I think David Reed (one of my fellow Croquet architects) really nailed what 3D interoperability should be. When we share 3D objects, we also need to share their behaviors. In most ways, the visual representation of an object is its least interesting aspect. What it can do, and how it interacts with the users and the worlds around it, however is REALLY interesting and very valuable.

This is also really hard to do. Everyone uses different languages and scripts, and some - like Croquet - use a very different mechanism for enabling behaviors. Croquet has TeaTime and the concept of future replicated messages to manage its behavior. This enables a peer-to-peer approach to designing interactions, which otherwise would be near impossible. The only other solution is what everyone else has to do, which is maintain a central server and replicate the results of the computations.

UBC Joins Croquet Consortium

The University of British Columbia (UBC), home of the recently established Arts Metaverse project, has just joined the Croquet Consortium! We look forward to having our colleagues from UBC join the rest of us in helping to create open source tools to support the unique needs of higher education.

Arts Metaverse is a 3D virtual environment based on the open-source Croquet platform. It is being developed under the guidance of Tim Wang and Ulrich Rauch in the The University of British Columbia's Arts Instructional Suppport & Information Technology unit. Arts Metaverse is intended to provide a way for scholars, teachers, students, and interested individuals to create their own virtual spaces in which they can interact and collaborate with others.

Croquet was chosen as the foundational technology for the Arts Metaverse project because it provides:

• A powerful P2P network support. When Croquet runs, it automatically detects other computers that are running Croquet.
• Portal technology that allows application sharing between different operating systems. So that you can play a PC game with your Mac friends.
• Video conferencing and other communication tools without using server technology.
• Ability for users to freely define the space being created, providing “land owners” (the academics) complete customizable controls of the environment. (e.g. not just define the gravitational force in the land).
• Ability to back up the contents published using Croquet, take worlds on line and off line, and avoid many copyright issues.
• A structured p2p Croquet network that is much more secure than a server based large scale metaverse.

Croquet SDK 1.0 Released

Nonprofit ‘Croquet Consortium’ Releases Open-Source Software Tool Kit to Promote Collaborative 3-D Virtual Environments

DURHAM, N.C. – March 27, 2007 – A nonprofit consortium of academic and corporate partners today announced the release of a free software toolkit for developers to use in creating 3-D "virtual environments."

"We’re seeking to enable the creation of a rich series of interconnected 'Croquet worlds' where people can engage in productive collaborative interactions in support of learning and commerce – worlds that can be created, maintained and continually modified without the constraints of proprietary computer code," said Julian Lombardi, assistant vice president of Duke’s Office of Information Technology.

The Croquet Consortium’s new "3-D Virtual Environments Software Developer’s Kit" (Croquet SDK 1.0) will promote collaboration among far-flung research teams working on everything from cancer cells to hurricanes, as well as active learning among students and their instructors. These networked 3-D teams from research, education and industry will be able to work together across a variety of computer platforms and devices, from laptops to cell phones.

"This will change the way people think about software and computation, from today’s device-oriented perspective to a perspective of computation as a persistent, pervasive service," said Patrick Scaglia, vice president and chief technology officer of HP's Imaging and Printing Group.

Croquet 3-D virtual environments can support live discussion among worldwide collaborators who come together in "real time" within a 3-D virtual space. They may view, manipulate and revise documents, dynamic visualizations or large amounts of data from sources such as laboratories or supercomputing centers.

Added Greg Nuyens, chief executive officer of Qwaq Inc., "we have found Croquet to be a compelling platform technology for developing very large scale, richly featured and interlinked virtual environments. With the release of the Croquet SDK, we are excited about the new possibilities for using Croquet in our products and see benefits for developers everywhere."

For example, public health officials and epidemiologists across a country could use the Croquet environment to track the spread of an infectious disease by sharing a dynamically changing display of infection data. Similarly, architects and engineers could collaborate on a building design, or chemists and biologists could prototype different chemical compositions for a new drug.

The free kit provides developers with a flexible tool to create virtual spaces with built-in networked telephony and a "late-binding object-oriented" programming language that allows multiple users to jointly create, animate or modify 3-D objects and dynamic simulations. Developers can also import and share resources, such as 2-D web applications or multimedia content, from their own systems. Working together across multiple locations, they can change simulations while they are running and work together to create new applications – all in "real time."

The kit can be downloaded from the consortium’s website, http://croquetconsortium.org.

The newly formed Croquet Consortium is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing and promoting the widespread adoption of open-source, Croquet technologies for research, education and industry. Its institutional supporters include Duke University, the University of Minnesota, HP, 3dSolve Inc. and Qwaq Inc. Croquet was initiated by Alan Kay – winner of the Kyoto Prize and the Turing and Draper awards – working in collaboration with David A. Smith, Andreas Raab, David P. Reed, Mark P. McCahill and Lombardi.

Croquet Consortium Launched

Technology giant HP (Hewlett-Packard), Duke University, The University of Minnesota, and Qwaq, Inc. have jointly announced the formation of The Croquet Consortium, Inc., a 501(3)c non-profit foundation dedicated to promoting the continued development and widespread adoption of open source Croquet technologies for use in education, research, and industry. The launch of The Croquet Consortium coincides with the Consortium’s release the open source Croquet Software Developer’s Kit 1.0 -- as free software under the Croquet Open Source License.

The Croquet Consortium provides an organizational base for the Croquet community of developers and users. Open to institutional and individual members, the Consortium offers an avenue for academic, corporate, and individual members ensure the long-term viability of the community by federating their Croquet software development projects mobilizing distributed resources on their behalf.

With the launch of The Croquet Consortium, Inc., the development and adoption of scalable Croquet-based applications for use in education, research and industry enters a new, expanded, and highly-inclusive phase of multi-institutional collaboration. The Consortium 1) establishes a legal home for the Croquet community, 2) coordinates the management, definition and release of core interoperable Croquet architecture, 3) provides a clearinghouse for the collection and distribution of freely available Croquet open source software artifacts, 4) supplies a management structure for the solicitation and mobilization of distributed development resources, and 5) creates a focal point for outreach activities, including the Consortium Website, Annual Conference, training workshops, fellowships, and sponsored projects.

For more information about the Consortium, click here.

Qwaq Unveils Virtual Spaces Software For Secure Enterprise Collaboration

Company releases Qwaq Forums, World’s First Virtual Workspace Application

PALO ALTO, CALIF. – March 13, 2007 – Qwaq, Inc., the creators of virtual spaces for the enterprise, today announced Qwaq Forums, the world’s only secure virtual workspace application. Qwaq Forums significantly enhances the productivity of distributed teams by bringing critical resources together in a virtual place, as if they were in an actual physical location, and providing them with all the tools and collaboration capabilities they need to work more effectively together. With Qwaq Forums, users can work together to establish workflow steps, create or review information in software applications, and evaluate designs in 2D and 3D, all while discussing topics using built-in text and voice chat. Further enhancing employee productivity, Qwaq Forums virtual workspaces are always available so users can return to a forum at another time to access and view changes that have occurred since they last visited the virtual space.

“Qwaq Forums is the first of several applications we’re building to provide enterprises with virtual spaces for real work,” said Greg Nuyens, Qwaq’s CEO. “We’ve received a fantastic response to the Qwaq Forums deployments in the energy market and by distributed industrial research teams. The virtual workspaces are allowing critical resources to collaborate more frequently and achieve better results.”

Qwaq Forums is easy to set up, use and navigate. Users can “drag-and-drop” content into a workspace from desktop and laptop computers, corporate servers or other locations. Information can be created, edited or reviewed using Microsoft Office and other productivity tools; corporate applications such as SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce.com; design and 3D modeling tools; web browsers; or Enterprise 2.0 applications. Qwaq Forums provides GUI controls that enable users to access remote applications and portals to other environments.

Unlike traditional collaboration tools, which only work while a session is in progress, Qwaq Forums is persistent, meaning it is accessible to authorized users all the time. Users can work with others in real time; enter Qwaq Forums any other time and see changes made by other team members since their last visit; and create or modify content, and hand off work to each other as needed.

“Our industrial research affiliates are scattered around the globe and Qwaq Forums enables us to easily bring these key players together in a virtual workspace,” said Charles House, executive director of Media X at Stanford University. “Qwaq Forums allows us to discuss and collaborate on critical research themes and make better decisions by reviewing intermediate research results more frequently.”

Qwaq Forums uses the Croquet open source software development environment, which enables the creation and deployment of large-scale, distributed multi-user virtual 3D applications and metaverses. The Croquet architecture, supported by the Croquet Consortium, provides synchronous communication, collaboration, resource sharing and computation among large numbers of users on multiple platforms and devices.

Qwaq’s founders, executives and advisory board members are all seasoned technology industry veterans and thought leaders with extensive experience working together to build successful companies. The Qwaq management team and key technical staff all share a deep background in developing and bringing to market highly scalable, distributed systems and have been involved in key industry developments such as graphical user interfaces, persistent networked objects, web services and Croquet. Qwaq’s team includes founder and CTO, David Smith, a 3D pioneer and chief system architect of the Croquet Project; Nuyens, former CEO of instant802, chief technologist at Inktomi and Xerox PARC alumni; and Vice President of Enterprise, Remy Malan, former marketing vice president at AtWeb and director at Sun Microsystems. Qwaq Advisory board members include Alan Kay, founder of the Croquet Project, winner of the Kyoto Prize, Turing and Draper Awards, and one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces; and Internet pioneer and Croquet architect David Reed.

Qwaq Forums is available immediately as a hosted service. A version of Qwaq Forums that can be deployed in the enterprise, behind the corporate firewall, will be available in the second quarter of 2007. For more information, visit www.qwaq.com

About Qwaq, Inc.

Qwaq, Inc. is creating virtual spaces for the enterprise that enable collaboration in ways that weren’t possible before. Qwaq Forums, the company’s first product, is a secure virtual workspace application that significantly increases the productivity of distributed teams by bringing critical resources together in virtual places, as if they were in an actual physical location. A highly interactive and persistent environment, Qwaq Forums enables users to work, collaborate with others, and identify and solve problems.

Croquet Featured at NMC 2006 Regional Conference

Croquet technology is being prominently featured at The 2006 NMC Regional Conference at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas November 8-10, 2006. Croquet was discussed in a track entitled "Bringing Virtual 3-D Worlds to Reality" devoted to an exploration of emerging practices in the use of 3D collaborative spaces, including experimental worlds created with new tools like Croquet, commercial metaverses like Second Life and World of Warcraft, as well as the range of supporting concepts and assessment strategies.