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.