Commercial Interest In Open-Source 3D Environment

cellulama writes "Is virtual reality back? A commercial vendor has started developing for Croquet, which is an open-source tool for collaborating and sharing data, with an emphasis on 3D visualization. The system was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for research and "co-creativity," but a company named 3Dsolve is looking for military applications. What's next -- open-source America's Army?"

Comments

Open-Sourcing the Army

[Justice8096]

I have yet to see any animosity towards open source in the military. They like open source because you don't have to wait 6+ months to get the purchase completed for proprietary stuff, and you don't have to worry about license problems when dealing with vendors ( the licenses can become a hostage towards keeping the contract ).

West Point a croquet partnet

[pkhuong]

http://croquetproject.org/Community/consortium.htm l:
has a list of Criquet's core education partners, which includes (in the middle of institutions more usually associated with CS)... United States Military Academy at West Point. I wonder what _they_ see in it. We know the military have always been interested in 3D and VR, but why do they see a need to for croquet rather than a normal (and probably better suied to 1st person view and simulation) 3D toolkit? Dynamism and good introspection aren't really needed to simulate airplanes, etc.?

On second thought... Agents fit particularly well in smalltalk's message passing paradigm... So does croquet's goal of seamless networking (iirc?), especially when simulating hundreds or thousands of agents. Smalltalk, the new lead (as in Pb) figurine! :)