Slashdot Mirror

1. Cross-link Facebook, Slashdot, Twitter, Second Life, Google Earth
2. Create detailed 3D body model for all Slashdotters
3. Render 3D models to latex masks.
4. Render 3D models to simulated virtual environment
5. Capture, drug and equip Slashdotters with goggles
6. Replace real-world Slashdotters with robot duplicates.
7. Profit!

or the bandwidth/lag of this but rather, how does it compare with something like Corquet that's a decentralized version, and how soon can we make something like .hack's The World.

The problem is 'policing' the content introduced to the system. In an open ended world like this it'd be trivial for someone to upload some malicious code. There'd have to be some sort of submission system where all code is reviewed before it's introduced to the system, but even that wouldn't be fool proof and it'd probably be pretty expensive.

Unless that system was peer to peer. Then everybody manages their own environment and it's no more dangerous than the web now.

Interoperability is the interesting part for me. Graphics can be upgraded, but if there is a simple standard available for me to connect my online persona with many different online worlds, that begins to change things.

Host your own servers, do your own stuff, invite who you want, go to other places on a whim (just type the address), visit other people, etc. I remember how bad websites were in the early 90's. Tacky animated gifs, horrible images... this is the second life of today. With time, standards, practices, and tools development, there is no reason SL type experiences won't improve much like websites have.

- DaftShadow

p.s. Keep an eye on OpenCroquet too. Not as much press, but Alan Kay et all are working diligently. They are approaching the idea of 3D mass-experience from a slightly different perspective, which has a lot of potential. I'm not a big squeak fan, but I have been intrigued with what I have seen.

Now, we have Second Life, which COULD be a totally awesome tool for learning OO... except the scripting language is like a crippled version of Basic.

You might want to look into Croquet then. It's based on Squeak, "worlds" can be distributed easily among various hosts, and it's open source. It's mostly designed as a collaborative / teaching tool. I'm always surprised that it never seemed to really take off.

Possibly not visually as slick (although...) as 2nd life but has *much* more potential.

How is this different from OpenCroquet ( http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page ) other than it requires a server (i.e. sells boxes) and is in Java (not Smalltalk)? Look at Qwaq ( http://www.qwaq.com/ ) to see some really interesting applications of Croquet for real-time conferencing.

The future of the interwebs may already be here. It is p2p, no centralized server and open source. Check out http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page and http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/About_the_Technology

The future of the interwebs may already be here. It is p2p, no centralized server and open source. Check out http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page and http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/About_the_Technology

I'm glad to see Linden Labs is moving in this direction. Unfortunately, unless they are bringing on help, they don't have the resources to handle all the issues in their main grid (which is what generates their revenue) so I do not see them being able to remotely support this initiative the way most people would expect.

Enter Croquet: http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page

Croquet allows for the creation of multiple, connected worlds through a system of portals and is already finding use in educational scenarios. Oh, and the fact that it is open source doesn't hurt either.

-PS

Check out http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page

Open source and well funded, based on Squeak Smalltalk.

The page I linked to says precisely this:

More specifically, Croquet runs every simulation locally. Everyone's executing on a computer, so if you give them all the same inputs at the same time, then you get the same results. This uses only local processing. The only thing that travels over the wire is the inputs: You type a key. I move my mouse. The other guy clicks.

If this is not, in fact, how Croquet works, then they should update their documentation.

Err... I'm afraid not. Take a look at Croquet's design. It's an old fashion P2P protocol in which each user forwards only their inputs (e.g. keypresses) over the network to other users. Every user must run the full simulation locally, making total network traffic and resource usage O(n^2) with the number of users.

This cannot scale to more than a handful of users. Croquet's design is fundamentally incapable of being "massively multiplayer". I would say that that makes it not "a better choice than Second Life" in quite a few cases.

(Never mind the fact that Second Life is a huge, proven, production system with hundreds of thousands of users whereas Croquet is an academic experiment.)

I would ask those actually excited by this announcement to please inspect Croquet, a collaborative, three-dimensional framework for cooperative computing that is built atop Squeak, the modern implementation of Smalltalk by Alan Kay and others.

Croquet is Open and Free now. It's in its early stages, but so is second life.

I don't know if Croquet is an excellent choice for building a metaverse, but I'm pretty sure it's a better choice than Second Life.

The OpenCroquet project is working on to provide the easy ability for a Virtual 3D Educational Metaverse http://www.opencroquet.org/ About: The Croquet Consortium is a 501c3 not-for-profit corporation dedicated to developing and promoting the widespread adoption of open source, Croquet technologies for research, education and industry.

OpenCroquet's technology in keeping the various clients in sync was intersting to me. I might have even learned the squeak programming language and started doing some development with it, but what ever happened to OpenCroquet? I never did find another pubically accessible server to connect to. The News Room has 04/18/2006 as the most recent entry and that was the 1.0 Beta. Compare that to the 19,098 on second life right now, the December 29, 2006 last client update, and today's source release. Sorry to say it, but unless OpenCroquet is going to put up a few islands for random people to interact and provide some updates once and a while it might as well be dead to me. They could at least update the news room once and a while to at least provide the appearance of the project being active.

I tried it, and it looks (and feels) really promising. The difference to SL is, Croquet is FAST (very close to real-time), because most of the work is done on the client side and synchronization works by sending behaviour not state.

http://www.opencroquet.org/

I've heard a lot of comparisons of Second Life to Snow Crash but I'm not sold yet on this step being purely progress forward. I don't even think I could think of server software that could handle all possible clients without the processing and network traffic getting exponential.

The real problem with SL is one of scalability. In the real world, we work on a combination of peer to peer and server based models; server-based because you have water, power, and communications services delivered to you; peer to peer because your house does not depend on your neighbor's house for anything, and they are effectively equal (even if their sizes are wildly disparate, for example, they both perform the same function.)

In Snow Crash, Stephenson's "Metaverse" was also a peer-to-peer network. It would seem to be highly similar to the web in some ways; links between servers, the capacity for hosting, et cetera. Of course, in Stephenson's world, cheap and plentiful bandwidth connects subscribers (in the form of L. Bob Rife's cable network.)

To make this long story short, we need a distributed architecture that allows you to host your own part of the game world. Monetary transactions between servers would occur in legal tender, and you could have any kind of currency you liked in your game world (if any.) Money transfers could be carried out through any number of services (paypal, egold, whatever.)

This permits as much scalability as you can afford. If you have the money, then you can have your "land" hosted elsewhere; otherwise you put it on your dinky little home connection and only a handful of people can connect at once. Still, this is pretty much the only way to accomplish this goal, and it keeps freedom in the hands of the people.

For a light technology demo version of this, one could add inter-server portals to Sauerbraten. In itself it wouldn't give you the full experience however, as there would be no scripting. Still, Sauerbraten is a collaborative building environment, so it would be interesting in itself.

For something a little more likely to be the future than Second Life, check out Alan Kay (and others)'s Croquet. Croquet is based on Squeak which in turn is a graphically rich Smalltalk environment. Thus Croquet is (or will be - it's in beta now) portable, consistent (Squeak has its own VM which is very consistent across all platforms) and fully Open. Not to mention, it works as I described :)

hear hear!

see http://opencroquet.org/

I'm surprised to see this topic on slashdot, since it is also the subject of a project I worked during the last half of 2006.

I was/am working on a platform and network schema involving social and collaborative network. As I see, the problem of social network is tight coupled with the digital identity (and I recommend watching the identity 2.0 presentation about this), specially when it comes to decentralization and interdependency. And that's something the big players are realizing in slow motion (if realizing at all). It's tiresome to setup an account in a closed service that offers X features, building your digital persona (linking interests, friends, communities, data, etc) and then, watch another service with X+1 interesting features, and not been able to use all the ground (interests, friend networks, photo album, etc) previously crafted. It's tiresome to be locked up by such services as well. Of course, this is just a glimpse on the burden of the present configuration and in the way those services are offered and used (at least, the ones that don't offer appropriated API's or other interoperability mechanisms). Not to mention the focus on features rather than people.

While working on this project, I've found that is more interesting to have a powerful communication standard that could structure people and information rather than create Another Social Network Service. For now, it seems less interesting to focus on application features and services than to focus on human identity, the information that surround it, and the way it is organized, related and published in the network.

I mean...how odd is to have a fragmented identity as we have now, spread along diverse systems that simply refuse to talk with each other? I feel ashamed when remembering I used to take this for granted.

Also, not long time ago, I heard about the project open-croquet. Personally, I fell that this project captures most of the essence I look for when thinking about social/collaborative network and personal computer usage.

Anyway, about the big players approach and inspired by (and quoting, in someway) a friend's affirmation: as long as they (big companies) try to model the user identity in it's own private space, social networking is not going to happen in all it's power. It's simply not good enough. In the same way, it doesn't make sense to have those myriads of social networks as isolated islands.

Our approach for the project, OTOH is an open one. We are looking for something more natural and organic, but still, using the web architecture (as opposed to open-croquet's approach). A better way to express ourselves, to experiment and use the network in social activities. A better way to structure and publish people and information for heterogeneous consumption. And we are working on it, using open standard all the way (such as Jabber, Atom, etc). Not really focusing on developing an application (like the parent), but on a communication model that applications can use (and, of course, proof of concept, prototypes and product implementations). We have made some presentations on free software events, and we will (possibly) go to FISL 8 to give a talk about this subject and our project as well.

Unfortunately we're still moving our project code (mostly prototypes and betas) to a project repository, so we don't have an official (and international) home page yet. But anyone interested in this subject and willing to share ideas (or directly contribute) to create something better in terms of social network is welcome (my contact is on my personal webpage)

I'd say python, or a similar language with a good interactive shell, and similarily equipped with with poweful libraries would be much better, because it would allow the kids to actually do usefull stuff.

On the other hand, if you want to give them a feel for how the computer "really" works, teach assembly programming. C has a place in modern programming, but I think it's a bad choice for a first language.

For just about any language, you can demonstrate basic concepts, and give such thrills as being able to print out your name 10 times etc. But for moving on to doing really cool stuff that you can show your friends, such as consuming rss, doing interactive 3d etc ... python would be an almost perfect fit, especially paired with a couple of modules/packages like http://www.pygame.org/ and http://ipython.scipy.org/.

Java comes a close second, but even using a tool such as http://judo.sourceforge.net/ or http://www.bluej.org/, java requires much, much more setup pr project to get up and running. Additionally java has no transparent compilation, which means you're stuck with the write-compile-test-cycle, rather that just write-test-change-test...

Another alternative would be http://www.squeak.org/ and/or http://www.opencroquet.org/. But it's a pretty steep learning-curve going from c to smalltalk, IMNHO. You're students should have an easier time of it, though.

Give some thought to what platform you and your students will be working on, too. For Mac OS X, I suppose objective-c might be a good place to start. On linux, I'd go with python, on windows, either python or c#.

The one good thing about c, that is also true for assembler *and* python, is simplicity. You don't *need* an IDE to get from idea to working program. Programming java with notepad and javac very quickly becomes difficult to manage, due to classpath-issues. But with c and assembly you'll still need linking for anything but the most trivial programs -- another win for python (or perl, ruby tcl, lisp etc).

Not really. The closest thing would be Croquet.

I turned 18 on October 7th- just a few weeks ago. I'm a senior in high school, and I've worked as a programmer at the San Diego Supercomputer interfacing the Open Croquet 3D operating system to their GIS servers, a database engineer at the University of California, San Diego, a researcher at Calit2, and lastly a network security analyst for Softwink, Inc.

I have no special contacts, no utterly unremarkable skill- I'm not trying to show off. My point is that if you can take the initiative to teach things to yourself so much as to qualify for a job (by the fact that you're asking for one, I can assume that you have), you need to put yourself out there and get one. It's not that hard- people are hiring, and if you're qualified, there's really not that much to stop them from letting you be an employee- or at least an intern.

Sorry for this horribly long-winded post. To summarize: just put yourself out there; don't ask slashdot.

- dshaw

Have you looked at Croquet? Granted, it is currently just a tech-demo, but it has enormous potential.

Open Croquet!.

Is already half done... but its called Croquet

http://www.opencroquet.org/about_croquet/faqs.html

Why not just use Croquet?

Opencroquet
It is stunning, biggest drawback is needing openGL which for the life of me I can't get going under Linux. Thus I have only tested on win2k where it is great. Download and try it, it is smalltalk based. It is built for decentralised use. It is very scaleable. It also does not like NATs so thats is a slowing point.

It is probably not going to change the world this week, but once more people are working on it and it gets around NAT and if openGL was not so critticle then I am sure lots linked up worlds would start happening.

Words can not describe it properly, you got to try it. Have a look at the demo videos of interactions. Technically it scores well mostly because so little bandwidth is required for people to share worlds, it does require half decent machines for the computations but anything in the last few years is good enough (ie in the GHz range)

It's true.. the fact that it's marketed as an entertainment product and yet there is talk from their developers and the community about possibly turning it into a platform for a new Internet... it's really confusing the brand. IMO, they're just full of it when they say they'll decentralize it some day. It sounds more like placating the concerned users. As mentioned above, it is far too late to change the entire structure of this system. They just hit 1 Million users. A complete re-write would cost them a fortune. Croquet however, is in a better position. You can read my review/comparison here.

Project Looking Glass was 'way ahead of the Vista 3D presentation, and still offers some cool effects that aren't available on Vista yet. I predict that soon after Vista comes out the OS community revives Looking Glass, couples it with Croquet and humiliates Micrososft by doing it on half the power at a fraction of the development cost.

http://www.sun.com/software/looking_glass/

http://www.opencroquet.org/

I would have thought that using an open source system specifically designed for multi-user conferences would have been a better choice for holding a virtual conference.

http://www.opencroquet.org/

Open Crouquet is shaping up pretty well and dosn't come with half the hassles, you don't have to worry about users gate crashing your conerence ( Conference is closed... coz of AIDS! ), you can run Croquet on your own hardware, and it can be customized to suit your needs..

Maybe someone should mention this this to Sun?

Are there public OpenCroquet islands out there? Any links? I haven't found any yet.

This has been I think in Squeak Alice for a long time.

Also in OpenCroquet via TPainter

http://opencroquet.org/
https://lists.wisc.edu/read/messages?id=1385929

and Impara has a beautiful commercial 2D/3D drawing program based on similar technology:

http://impara.de/projekt_plopp_engl.html

Interesting. If OLPC includes Squeak, won't that also mean increased popularity for Croquet, that 3D environment project?

I'd be happy to see wider use of Python (and Pygame) by kids, as I've found it easy to learn and use. One thing Python needs for beginners on Windows, though, is an obvious link to IDLE (the IDE). Currently it's buried in a subdirectory, so a newbie won't quite know how to open the editor and start saving/running programs, seeing error feedback, using the console, etc..

The Croquet project is an effort to develop a new open source computer operating system built from the ground up to enable deep collaboration between teams of users. To do this, the project seeks to define and develop a system is focused on the simulation and communication of complex ideas. We call this "communication enhancement" - the direct extension of the abilities of humans to develop, understand, and describe even the most complex simulations. Croquet enables this communication by acting as the equivalent of a broadband conferencing system built on top of a 3D user interface and a peer-to-peer network architecture. Through the public release of this software technology, we are seeking to harness the creative power of thousands of software developers and seed the development of transformative technologies.

here are 3 more you should look at:

  http://www.alice.org/
  http://www.opencroquet.org/
  http://www.runrev.com/

  The first 2 are free, the 3rd is commercial - sometimes
      free versions show up on the DVDs from british computer
      mags.
  I looked at several 3D programming enviroments a few
    years ago, and these stood out as being accessible
    to beginning programmers. I can't give much detail
    beyond that, all three have pretty good documentation
    and active communities. They are also notable for making
    fairly complex graphics easily accessible.
  That isn't much to go on, but it will be very worth your
    while to look at these environments.

http://www.opencroquet.org/ -- p2p shared 2d/3d metaverse software is as capable as any combination of web publishing and web browsing software.

developers should concentrate on "web n.0" metaverse projects like these instead of segregating the web across different web sites, platforms, and protocols.

Keep in mind that even the genius of Alan Kay is still experimenting with ways to make 3D a useful, intuitive medium of expression. My personal feeling is that, so long as we are stuck using a 2D display, 3D applications are only going to be useful for displaying data that are 3D or 4D. However, that doesn't mean we should wait until we can "jack-in" to the Net before we explore how best to build and navigate a 3D colaborative world... So what if it may not be ready for main-stream use (you could argue that 2D desktops aren't ready for main-stream yet, in fact...) That doesn't mean we should lock it away until then. We're the geeks, people! Lets explore the frontier.

ok, ok, OpenCroquet.org is still in the works.
Speed- they want OpenCroquet to work first, then they'll optimize it, however the beta version is still faster than the alpha version from a few years ago. There are also different projects, http://map.squeak.org/packagebyname/Exupery , and, http://goran.krampe.se/blog , to speed up what OpenCroquet is based on the Squeak VM. I know one problem is intel's lack of registers. That was the reason I hoped that Itanium would last- MORE REGISTERS! Too bad...
    Security- from the docs:
"A name space and security model is being developed. Our early study seems to indicate that a capabilities model similar to that used by the E [10] language is the proper
course." http://www.opencroquet.org/Site%20PDFs/2003%20Croq uet%20Collab%20Arch.pdf

So, in time...
Very importantly you must remember that, as it's princably/originally based off from being a smalltalk computer, it is meant to be it's own complete system. Think of it as futher than just an OS or NOS, but as a complete Collaborative OS. So you have to think as if you just started using a completly new OS. It takes some time to get used to. Also, like I said before it's still beta, for now...

Surprised it does not mention The Croquet Project AKA Open Croquet http://www.opencroquet.org/

You can send your $50 to the Croquet project...a P2P, fully interactive, 3D metaverse written in Squeak Smalltalk with an opensource license and a working prototype.

I think it's more about convering into a single piece of software that can make all the different kinds of virtual worlds and MMOGs. The Croquet Project is working on that.

With the Croquet Project something like this could actually happen. The thing is that in Croquet, you'll eventually be able to make Croquet Spaces that are just as different as the different virtual worlds are now. For some worlds you could have persistent avatars if you wanted to, and entirely different ones with others.

How does this compare to The Croquet Project?

When I think about persistant online worlds I always think about the way it worked in Reboot. They all lived in the local computer and then jumped into the game blocks in which they received unique attributes. I think in the future we'll have a similar setup, (much like croquet) where you will have a local 3D world, (probably of your own design), and be able to 'step' into the other worlds owned by other people. In this new world you will have whatever presence the owner of the world grants you. Currently these worlds are MMoRPGs, but who's to say in the future you won't simply step across into your friend's world on his local computer to say 'hi'.

The Open Source Croquet Project is the future. It's a platform that is will be very well suited for creating virtual worlds of all kinds when it's a bit more functional. It is very flexible and extendable. Objects can be coded in OpenGL and the graphics engine is very extendable and new features and support for vendor specific extensions can be added. The networking capabilities is still pretty early in development. Currently you have to use a VPN if you want to connect to other people over the internet, and the content servers are only in experimental betas.

I'm glad to see someone else take Stallman to task. It wouldn't call him fascist though; he's more of a communist. He is to the services-based economy what Marx was to the manufacturing-based economy. Little does the FSF realize that profits are an incentive to create value for society. Open source software is inherently commodity, and thus produces little innovation. Compare that to Mac OS X, Solaris, and yes, even Windows.

I absolutely agree that lower-level software probably ought to be open source purely because of the commodity issue. Most higher-level software, from consumer-oriented entertainment products—video games, etc.—to business-targeted programs—financial systems, multimedia authoring, etc.—will tend to be commercial though.

Regarding items like croquet, it is pretty risky to "start over." Intel tried this with Itanium and no one bought it. AMD instead built on the existing x86 to produce Opteron, which was a huge success. They followed the advice of Newton and stood on the shoulders of a giant. If croquet succeeds, it will be a major coup. But the odds are against them; many people try to one-up the wheel and end up reinventing the square.

It was inevitable and of course it has a bright future. We don't need anybody to tell us this. Those of us that used to play around on BBSs back in the early 80s on our Apple IIes, and such, could see that.

What we do need to realize is that closed-source/proprietary has its role as well. If the goal is "freedom" for the user then that has to encompass all the tools available. The GPL and the strong leadership of Torvalds has insured a level playing field for that above it on the software stack but we need to be wary of Stallman/FSF fascist dogma. Open Source tends to work very well at the lower levels of the software stack - glibc, the kernel, other libraries, but we need to recognize that we need to provide incentives to innovate at the ever higher-ends of the software stack as well. I consider the rather luke-warm adoption of desktop linux (yes it is, I've been using it a work for the past 8 years) to be indicative of both factionalization and the perils of "giving everything away" at the higher-end of the software stack.

I would keep an eye out on croquet (or something in that realm), for what will be the next leap in collaboration. Definitely check out this recent video (might be windows only). I consider this web 3.0

Someone already mentioned it, but OpenCroquet is probably the next MOO, plus a whole lot more. I recommend watching this fairly recent video (October of last year) to see what it's all about.

It is about fashion. Count "Ruby" in replies, > 100. Count "Smalltalk" ~ 5. A cleaner language with better library is talked about so much less ....

try Squeak Smalltalk
try 3D Croquet