I stumbled upon the open source Croquet project a little over a year ago. According to their website:
Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices.
I see it as being like a version of Second Life based more on productivity and less on social networking.
I intend to use this blog to revisit some of the solutions for virtual collaboration I have seen in the past and the new ones I discover during my research. My reasons for researching these existing solutions is really two-fold. First, because of my limited technical abilities, I will need to find a developer-friendly platform that has much of what I need built in. Second, by examining the strengths and weaknesses of existing solutions I hope to better form my own ideas.
I mention Croquet first, because I feel like “in theory” it is the closest thing to what I envision in my head as an effective real time collaborative learning tool. In execution, Croquet is an example of many of the things that I intuitively question when interfacing with virtual environments. My primary questions are, how pleasing or rich is the environment and user experience, and what advantages exist to operating in such environment? I am expanding these questions into a list several smaller questions that I am using to drive my initial research. For example, in the demo video above, I don’t see any advantages to showing a spreadsheet at a distance on angle. I do, however, think a lot could be done to use 3D to enhance data visualization. I really respect the effort that has gone into the projects like Croquet, but the exciting thing about open source is that there is always room for new ideas.
As a disclaimer, I should mention that I have yet to participate in a fully developed Croquet project. The demo version I downloaded about a year ago was difficult to get going (remember I am a designer not a programmer), the platform itself is written in Squeak which not a language I am familiar with. I remember thinking it was an awesome concept and a cool environment but sparsely populated, with few meaningful activities to engage in. I plan on downloading the latest version in the near future.