So I've only recently been exposed to screen shots of Croquet, including animated on Google video, but the whole experience is reminiscent of ActiveWorlds, which my friends and I have been exploring for years. Bonnie DeVarco (exBFI archivist) was a chief avatar for this technology, developing Virtual High School, or, as our oncologist would prefer, Virtual Cancer Conference (why fly to San Antonio to an overbooked venue, to watch PowerPoints from the cafeteria on a flat screen?). You can network virtually too, given sufficient bandwidth (which busy doctors should have).
In other words, I'm seeing a lot of precedent for Croquet in the culture already, which means it likely does have a bright future. But I'm not sure everyone will syndicate under the one brand name. If t-Time is as good as people say, it oughta go the route of HTTP and promote interoperability between several alternatives in the same "virtual worlds" genre. We're not all about to jump ship, having collectively spent hundreds of man years builting nifty little cities in EduVerse or wherever (friends and I built an entire university based on Fuller's 60 degree coordination, versus the mainstream's 90 degree idea of "normal"). So let's assume peer-to-peer updating and synching becomes another basic protocol over TCP/IP, and various OSs rise to the occassion and develop a "shared world" mentality (suitable for doctor conferencing, other communications). The "NetMeeting" idea evolves to a more OpenGL style board room, complete with water pitcher and fluttering staff. The shared white board, although virtual, is persistent, and the company's legal department is actually authorized to take these peer-to-peer meetings as the real deal. That'd be a fulfillment of the Croquet prophecy I think, but we wouldn't necessarily have its characteristic branding going (e.g. that whole Alice in Wonderland theme). There's ample precedent to keep the "worlds" genre heterogenous. I personally might prefer a product from Cyan out of Spokane, just as t-Time compatible. When Alan Kay and I communicate virtually, we'd each have a selection of clients. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
