The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, an open source software platform, a network Operating System, for developing and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications (Collaboration Ware). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project https://croquet.io/

Aug'2021 thread re metaverse/web3

2021: Most Croquet developers use JavaScript or TypeScript; however, the Croquet libraries are also compatible with WebAssembly.

Jul'2019: orig by David A Smith: Just to clarify the versions of Croquet, and why I sometimes refer to the new Croquet as Croquet V.

• The first Croquet-like system was ICE, interactive collaboration environment. You can see a video of it here: https://youtu.be/KFdeVRteiSY
• The second Croquet-like system was Virtus Open Space. It was the basis of the game engines for Rainbow Six and Timeline. It was a component platform, but unfortunately the collaboration part was lost.
• The third Croquet was "classic" Croquet. Written in Smalltalk and created by Alan Kay, David Reed, Andreas Raab and me. It was actually two different versions - pre-TeaTime where I developed the concept of a meta message, and simple-TeaTime, which was very similar to what we have today in Croquet. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/XZO7av2ZFB8. This was used as part of Alan Kay's Turing Award lecture that I was incredibly proud to participate in. This was also the platform we used to create Teleplace and lives on in Terf.
• The fourth version was the Virtual World Framework (VWF), which was developed for the DoD while I was a Senior Fellow at Lockheed Martin. This was a complete reboot and was written in JavaScript by David Easter. Here is an amazing application built by Rob Chadwick using VWF - https://youtu.be/utEVly2KCnE. VWF is still being used, but I think of it as more of a prototype to the current implementation. We learned an incredible amount from every one of these implementations and what is so exciting to me is that the current system is not only far smaller and efficient, it is also far more powerful."
• So the core devs went on the route to closed source and moving to JavaScript.

older notes

2007-04-18-KayCroquetNsf

A Squeak-based programming environment (Squeak Smalltalk) serves as Croquet's foundation since Croquet requires capabilities best provided by a true late-bound message-sending (Messaging) language while at the same time providing users with collaborative access to everything from the virtual machine to the compiler. Croquet's relationship to Squeak gives Croquet the property of a purely object-oriented system.

https://www.croquet.io/

Since release of the Croquet SDK in 2007, the SDK has not been under active development. All continued development of the technology has taken place under the very active Open Cobalt effort.

Mar'2011: TelePlace is developing Croquet for the Enterprise market.

May'2011 announcement: Teleplace, the leading provider of virtual workspaces (Virtual World), today announced a new open source project called Open Qwaq. The Open Qwaq project will enable organizations - large and small, profit and not-for-profit - to implement virtual workspaces for their specific needs. In addition, Teleplace announced Teleplace Connect, a new product that integrates virtual workspaces with enterprise collaboration solutions, like Microsoft SharePoint.

• some discussion of this move, includes references to other products/platforms (including Open Sim (Open Simulator), which is an Open Source Second Life server)
• Open Qwaq has some Python integration
• The original authors of Croquet opened a commercial company named Qwaq which was later renamed to Teleplace. That technology was later sold back to a group of the original Croquet developers and became Immersive Terf.
  • Dec'2011: In May, we wrote that Redwood City, California-based virtual worlds company Teleplace, Inc. open sourced its platform in order to grow its market — and that the company would continue to offer paid hosting and support, and continue working on new features. At least, that was what Teleplace CEO Tony Nemelka told us. But what happened instead is that, that very same month, the company laid off most of its staff, outsourced its support, and began taking other steps to shut down the company entirely... But it’s software continues to live on as OpenQwaq — and, even better, development is continuing. Since Teleplace released its software as open source, any vendor has been able to run it on their servers and offer hosting to customers. But the vendor that has been doing the most is 3D Immersive Collaboration Consulting, LLC, or 3D ICC.