Edusim, Croquet & Cobalt

News: Google Sketchup Models Imported into a Cobalt World



“Cobalt” is an open source virtual world browser and construction toolkit application being developed at Duke University. Cobalt will make it possible for people to easily create, publish, access, and participate in a network of linked virtual worlds. Currently in pre-alpha and built using the Croquet open source software platform, Cobalt uses peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers and makes it very simple to create and share secure virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.

[01/12/08] Immersive Education Initiative Selects Croquet as Next Generation Immersive Education Platform

On January 12th, it was announced at The Boston Media-Grid Summit that the Immersive Education Initiative has selected Croquet as one of three official "next generation" immersive education platforms. The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia companies, and foundations that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. The Initiative will now direct both funding and programming resources towards the development and deployment of open source Croquet technologies and open source Croquet-based educational applications. Selection criteria for this important honor included the following:

• 1) support for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems
• 2) availability as open source code
• 3) vendor-neutral client and server architectures (no vendor lock-in)
• 4) stable and reliable runtime implementations
• 5) integrated text chat and voice chat
• 6) high resolution graphics
• 7) multi-user support for collaboration
• 8) highly customizable avatars that support high resolution graphics and body animation (gestures)
• 9) support for user-created content.
  

The other two immersive education platforms selected were Sun's open source Project Wonderland client and the now open source Second Life client.