Information Tunnels to Virtual Worlds.

From my brain to your brain. My brain is the world’s best information processing system, so is yours by the way, so are 6 billion other brains, and a few billion monkey or ape brains aren’t doing that bad either. My dog of course is the brainiest of all. Naturally, he has probably the same set of mirror neurons I have. I know instantly when he is in a bad mood, and so does he …and it all happens without saying a word. How mirror neurons do that you can find out on this fascinating video.

But back to brain – the human one - talking to brain. The 'in-between' the two or more is a problem. A couple of miles of distance between two brains requires technology for transferring information. There is a bottleneck that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation. For example the Google ads on this page. Google responded “cleverly" to the keyword “container”, yet took it entirely out of context. No, I’m not dealing with shipping containers. I’m dealing with containers for information and there is one we all know so well and of which Preston Austin and Julian Lombardi, two of the key architects of the Croquet project, say it sucks. We're talking about the World Wide Web.

They point out that over the last 20 years our communication “container” on the Internet was a flat “document” inside of which were other flat documents that we then could shuffle around, and replace with even more flat documents and now and again some flashing lights and animations. Browser developers try to do so much these days, but in the end browsers still do the same thing as 20 years ago, shuffle around flat documents on a flat desktop.

Internet chat was 'flat’ too. Scrolling panes of texts. But although at the time our 2D world was flat it still sort of worked. Our brains compensated well on what was missing with a lot of fantasy. In the late nineties I would spend hours in what was called “The Palace". Wiki: “The Palace is a software program used to access two-dimensional virtual communities, also called palaces. A typical palace is represented as a series of flat backgrounds with one or more clickable areas, or doors, and players represented by either the default spherical avatar or a user-created avatar up to 132×132 pixels large, with an 8-bit color palette.”

It was great, I still have overseas friends from that time. But nevertheless it was rather limited and limiting. “Rooms” were small pictures of “rooms”, doors were “holes” in the pictures you would click on and jump into a new room or to a different palace. And chat happened with these wonderful "cartoonish" speech bubble clouds above the avatar’s head. Bandwidth and computing power didn’t allow for much more. But it was cool and it was free!

Then came 3D and broadband and today we’re playing over the Internet in “virtual worlds” such as Second Life, Entropia, Everquest and others. A lot of people put a lot of money, skill and computing power into these 3D worlds also known as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), and they cost massive dollars for users. Certainly more than for example educational institutions, non-government organizations, clubs, user groups etc. could afford. These wouldn’t be much interested in role playing games anyway. But what about having meetings, lectures, discussions, work shops, business presentations in a 3D enviroment with VoIP, video, and all the bells and whistles where you and your avatar could walk around, shake hands, sit in a virtual café and just simply talk? This is what the croquet project (Wiki) is all about.

So what is croquet ?

“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 that 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.”

Simply put your screen is not a flat document on your flat desktop anymore but a 3D space, a room or even a whole world. Croquet is what I’ve been waiting for since my days in “The Palace”.

Picture: 1998 Palace screenshots in a current Croquet based 3D gallery (Citris Gallery Builder).