D.A. Smith’s scientific contributions

A new architecture like Croquet presents numerous opportunities and challenges to create useful interfaces to enable access to the underlying power of the system. In particular, our focus on an integrated 2D and 3D system ensures that we have a rich intellectual environment within which to explore. This experience is similar to the development of the original modern windowing user interface created by Alan Kay, his team at Xerox Pare, and his Squeak team (Ingalls et al., 2002; Kay, 1996). Just as those teams did, we also have an infrastructure that is rich enough to allow us to perform some deep exploration into the presentation and manipulation of rich media expressed in 3D, and in the negotiations through these rich media worlds. A number of key technologies will be discussed including dynamic movable portals, floating 3D windows, true 3D creation tools, live teleporting snapshots, and completely new concepts such as 3D portals.

Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between teams of users. It is a totally open, totally free, highly portable extension to the Squeak (Ingalls et al., 2002) programming system. Croquet is a complete development and delivery platform for doing real collaborative work. There is no distinction between the user environment and the development environment. Croquet is focused on interactions inside of a 3D shared space that is used for context based collaboration, where each user can see all of the others and what their current focus is. This allows for an extremely compelling shared experience. A new collaboration architecture/protocol called TeaTime has been developed to enable this functionality. The rendering architecture is built on top of OpenGL (Woo et al., 1999).